Sponsors sought to restore Rome
The cash-strapped city of Rome is asking corporate sponsors and wealthy donors to help it restore historic sites, including the Forum, the Circus Maximus and even ancient sewerage pipes.
Claudio Parisi Presicce, Rome’s cultural superintendent, said the city was counting on the desire of people to contribute to the foundations of Western values, as he announced a list of hundreds of sites needing attention.
The initiative by Rome, which is struggling with debts of €12 billion (NZ$19.8b), looks to build on restoration work paid for in recent years by top fashion companies in return for publicity.
Work funded by luxury label Fendi has stripped years of encrusted smog from the Trevi Fountain. Jewellery and luxury goods maker Bulgari is restoring the Spanish Steps, while shoe company Tod’s has sent experts armed with tiny brushes to clean up the Colosseum.
The new list of work to carry out at dilapidated and graffiticovered sites totals €436 million (NZ$720m). Sponsors will be allowed to plaster their logos over the scaffolding but will not get any long-term naming rights.
New excavations at the Forum will cost €3m, work at the Circus Maximus to bring lost ruins to light will cost €1m, and restoring the gladiators’ training school next to the Colosseum will need €2m. More than €8m will be required to restore the Oppian Hill, one of the seven hills of Rome, where tramps set up shelters among the ruins.
The city wants €10m to restore 80 fountains, while a further €600,000 will patch up the Virgin aqueduct, which still supplies the Trevi Fountain.
For little more than €9m, Rome will shore up and build a walkway around the 3rd-century walls that surround the city but which tend to crumble in heavy rain.
‘‘It’s unthinkable to do it alone,’’ said Rome’s commissioner Francesco Paolo Tronca, who has been running the city since Ignazio Marino resigned as mayor last year over an expenses scandal. ‘‘We need help to help Rome continue to be a point of reference for beauty in the world.’’
A second list has been created for €15m worth of essential day-today maintenance of sites, starting at €300 for cutting overgrown grass at Trajan’s Market, opposite the Forum.
‘‘The city does not have the resources even to cut the grass,’’ Presicce said.
He acknowledged that billionaires and fashion companies might see little glory in footing the bill for mowing lawns. However, Romans are less likely to open their wallets to restore their rundown city in the wake of corruption scandals which have revealed how city councillors siphoned off taxpayers’ money. The reverend daughter of renowned South African churchman Desmond Tutu says she will give up her Anglican Church licence after marrying a woman.
The Rev Canon Mpho Tutu-Van Furth said she had chosen to make a ‘‘dignified’’ exit rather than be stripped of her right to practice, since the church does not recognise gay marriage.
‘‘Because the South African Anglican Church does not recognise our marriage, I can no longer exercise my priestly ministry in South Africa,’’ she said.
‘‘The bishop of the [Cape Town] diocese was instructed to revoke my licence. I decided that I would give it to him rather than have him take it.’’
The loss of such a respected and well-known church figure could strengthen the hand of modernisers in Africa’s most liberal country, who could push at a provincial meeting in September for a more nuanced approach to gay clergy in South Africa.
Same-sex marriage was legalised in South Africa in 2006. Bishop Raphael Hess, in whose diocese Tutu’s Cape Town base falls, said he was ‘‘vexed’’ by the need for her to renounce her clerical duties but hoped it would be short-lived.
Tutu is one of five children of Desmond Tutu, the former archbishop of Cape Town who won the Nobel Peace Prize for standing up to the apartheid government and seeking to reconcile South Africans. He has also spoken out in favour of gay marriage, saying he would refuse to go to a ‘‘homophobic heaven’’.
Tutu is divorced with two children. She married her long-time partner Marceline Van Furth, an atheist academic who is also divorced with children, in her native Netherlands in December.