Romans cry enough as the Eternal City goes to the hogs

Fed up with seeing wild boar trotting down busy streets and seagulls gnawing on dead rats, Romans are to protest against the sad state of the Eternal City.

Playgrounds are falling apart, parks resemble jungles, trees drop branches on cars and occasionally pedestrians, and motorcyclists must brave a slalom course of potholes on battered roads.

Now, under the hashtag romadicebasta – ‘‘Rome says enough’’ – residents’ associations, civil society groups and ordinary Romans will come together for a sitin outside the city’s renaissance town hall later this month.

Many are bitterly disappointed with the record of Virginia Raggi, the mayor, who was elected in 2016 promising a fresh start and an end to cronyism and corruption. They say life in the city is worse under Raggi, a member of the Five Star Movement, which rules nationally with the far-Right League.

‘‘This city is now unliveable,’’ said Marco, a 33-year-old taxi driver, as he negotiated gridlocked traffic and roadworks near the Basilica of St John in Lateran, near the British embassy. ‘‘We can’t go on like this.’’

The parlous condition of Rome is portrayed in a video that has gone viral online, in which wild boar root through overflowing sacks of rubbish and a large plastic skip floats away on floodwater during a storm.

One clip shows a public bus on fire about 200m from the Trevi Fountain – one of 21 buses that have burst into flames so far this year because of a lack of maintenance.

‘‘Rome has been abandoned to itself,’’ said Emma Amiconi, one of the organisers of the protest on October 27. ‘‘Many people who voted for Five Star are disappointed. It is true that the administration inherited a difficult situation, but 28 months after what was hailed as ‘the victory of the citizens’ the city is worse than ever,’’ she told La Repubblica newspaper.

Business leaders are also alarmed at the state of the capital.

‘‘The status quo is very worrying to us,’’ said Filippo Tortoriello, the president of a business association called Unindustria. ‘‘We’ve not heard anything about how Rome should move forward over the next 20 or 30 years.There’s no vision.’’

The shabby state of Rome may explain why tourists tend not to come back. The city has a much lower rate of repeat visitors than London and Paris, according to Federalberghi, an Italian association of hoteliers.

‘‘Fifty per cent of tourists who choose to come to Rome do it just one time,’’ said Giuseppe Roscioli, the president of the association.

Roberto Necci, a researcher, said: ‘‘All our studies point to the same conclusion – people come to Rome just once, while they go three or four times to other European capitals such as Paris and London.’’ – Telegraph Group