The Roman ruins of modern Italy

With its finances in disarray, its infrastructure crumbling and Rome’s public services in a mess, it is no wonder Italians are remembering Mussolini with fondness

wo millennia ago, engineers in the Roman Empire managed to do something that their modern-day counterparts have failed to achieve — keep the city of Rome supplied with water. Their 11 ancient stone aqueducts supplied each of Rome’s fickle citizens with a cubic metre of clean drinking water daily.

A month ago, at the height of an Italian summer that saw temperatures spike to 40 degrees Celsius, city officials in Rome faced a water shortage. The famed historical fountains were turned off while water rationing was introduced across the metropolitan area for 4.3 million people.

The Mayor of Rome, Virginia Raggi, a leftist and anti-establishment 39-year-old member of the 5-Star Movement who leads the municipal council of Europe’s fourth-largest city, has come under intense criticism for her handling of the water crisis as the 2.8 million living inside the city limits also suffered from a garbage crisis, its transport links creaked through heavy loads and labour woes, and its ageing infrastructure crumbled from decades of under-investment.

In truth, Raggi cannot be blamed for the dry spring months that initially caused the water shortage, but Romans have had enough.

“We know Rome was not built in a day,” Roberto Giachetti, vice-president of the lower house of Italy parliament, posted on Facebook. “But a year of Raggi seems more than enough to give her the coup de grace.”

Adding to the sense of rage at Rome’s decay, a local environment group published a report noting that 44 per cent of the water in the city’s system was lost through to leaks and years of neglect. In the heat, buses too caught fire on Roman streets — and the new head of the corporation that is supposed to run its buses quit after three months on the job.

He fired a parting shot at drivers and staff for their high rates of absenteeism, and with debts of €1.3 billion (Dh5.67 billion), the corporation struggled to find any bank willing to lend it money to repair and maintain its buses.

The burning sense of foreboding isn’t confined to Rome alone. In Palermo, where water rationing was also in effect, residents were furious after reports emerged that precious water supplies were being used to service cruise ships calling at the local port.

Economic uncertainty

Italy’s economy is the third-largest in the group of 19 nations that use the euro in the 28-member European Union, and unlike some Roman buses, it managed to chug along at a sluggish 0.4 per cent growth in gross domestic product in the first half of this year. And just like Rome’s bus corporation, Italy is saddled with a heavy debt burden. Italy’s public debt-to-GDP ratio is 133 per cent, the second-highest in the Eurozone after Greece.

Italians like to remember that under the regime of dictator Benito Mussolini, who ruled the nation for two decades up to 1943, Italy’s trains ran on time. Given the economic uncertainty and the summer water, garbage and wildfires, support for the far-right in Italy is growing.

This week, politicians were calling on Italy’s Ministry of the Interior to ban a march planned in Rome at the end of next month. That is being organised by the extreme-right Forza Nuova (New Force) party on October 28 and 29 to mark the 95th anniversary of Mussolini’s own March on Rome, a seminal event that led to his National Fascist Party taking power. The neo-fascists also want to take Italy out of the Eurozone and out of the EU and, according to opinion polls, enjoy low single digit support.

Those same opinion polls, however, also show increased support for centre-right parties, with Forza Italia, the party led by 81-year-old Silvio Berlusconi, the four-time prime minister and convicted influence peddler, gaining in popular support.

Berlusconi’s party, along with others who draw support from the same ideological pool, have watered down their policies for Italy to drop the common European currency. Instead, they are offering a variety of proposals involving the adoption of a second currency to be used for domestic transactions, with the euro to be retained for its business dealings with the rest of the EU. Three of Italy’s four largest parties — the 5-Star Movement, the right-wing Northern League and Berlusconi’s Forza Italia — propose introducing the parallel currency after the 2018 election.

They have settled on the dual currency proposal as a way of continuing to tap into widespread anti-euro sentiment in Italy while avoiding — at least for now — the huge upheaval and market turmoil that outright euro exit may trigger.

Opinion polls currently point to a hung parliament in which they could get a majority of seats, but would be unlikely to form a government due to divisions on other issues.

Single or dual currencies, however, Italy and Rome’s crumbling public services need new rounds of financing, lest more buses break down, pipes go on leaking, water remains scarce and garbage goes uncollected. What would the Romans make of their empire now?