When in Rome, seagulls do whatever they want

ROME — In her fourth-floor apartment in central Rome, Emanuela Tripi awoke at dawn to the terrifying sounds of a home invasion. She crept into her kitchen and spotted the culprit — long white neck, red-rimmed eyes, yellowwebbed feet — stabbing its beak into a garbage bag.

Growing up in Sicily, Tripi always had a romantic vision of seagulls, but now she was face to face with a predator that has aggressively colonized a city a good 20 miles from the sea. She threw a slipper. It ignored her. She lifted a second slipper. It cawed violently and charged.

“Arrivederci, you win,” she thought as she closed the door behind her.

As her cat cowered, wetting the couch, she banged on the door to scare off a bird she described as “enormous, above my knee, as big as an American wild turkey.” But it stayed “like it was its place” she said, until it was done eating and flew back out the window.

Romans have for years bemoaned the degradation of their city: the potholes, the burning buses, the unkempt parks and the uncollected garbage, stinking its streets and clogging its river.

But the seagulls aren’t complaining about the overgrown spaces and free food, and their raucous sundown ritual of circling over the Forum and Palatine Hill does not augur well for Rome.

“We’ve told them Rome is their home,” said Francesca Manzia, the director of the Italian League for Bird Protection in Rome. “And they are acting like it.”

The seagull population in Rome has grown in recent years to the tens of thousands, according to some experts. Their physical dimension has grown, too, as they gorge on the smorgasbord of trash and snack on handouts from complicit tourists.