As trash and weeds pile up, Rome tries to toss out mayor
ROME — Curbside weeds in Rome grow so tall, they cover car door handles, giving new meaning to the term urban jungle. With sidewalks impassable because of piles of uncollected trash, people resort to pushing baby strollers down the middle of pothole-pocked streets. Overflowing garbage bins attract wild boars, terrifying passersby.
As for mass transit, some subway stations in the commercial heart of the city, awaiting sorely needed escalator repairs, have been closed for months.
Rome’s first populist mayor, Virginia Raggi is running for a second term in an election Sunday and Monday, and the sorry state of basic municipal services such as trash pickup and street maintenance is a major issue in this city of ruins, just as it was the first time around.
In 2016, Raggi was a 37-year-old, little-known lawyer and city council member when elected.
She quickly became one of the most prominent faces of the 5-Star Movement, a grassroots populist phenomenon created a decade earlier by an Italian comic, and, as of 2018, the largest party in the national Parliament.
Raggi’s election “was hailed as something savior-like. Great change was expected,” said Paolo Conti, who for years has curated a letters-to-theeditors section, not surprisingly heavy with citizen complaints about trash and public transportation, in the Rome pages of the national newspaper Corriere della Sera.
After five years of Raggi’s administration, plagued by frequent turnover of city commissioners and heads of public agencies, “objectively, the city is in worse shape” than when she arrived, Conti said in an interview.
“Worse” is particularly damning, considering that when Romans elected her, they were desperate. They had taken to cleaning up Rome themselves, neighborhood by neighborhood, park by park, bagging trash, filling potholes and passing the hat to pay gardening businesses to pull weeds in playgrounds.
Romans then didn’t even have a mayor. Raggi’s predecessor, a surgeon-turned-politician, had resigned months earlier amid an expense account scandal in which he was later vindicated.
None of the 22 candidates for mayor this time is given any real chance of clinching more than 50% of the vote. That means the top two finishers will meet in a runoff two weeks later.
Raggi turns defensive about the out-of-control weeds. Since 2000, no new gardeners have been hired by the city, and when she took office, “they didn’t even have the tools” to properly do their job tending to Rome’s many parks and other green spaces, she said.
When traffic practically vanished during the very first strict months of Italy’s pandemic lockdown, road crews had a rare opportunity to work 24/7 filling crater-like potholes without causing tie-ups. But the lockdown is over and the holes largely remain, tripping up motor scooter riders, sometimes with fatal results.