Romans are rising up to tackle fraud and filth
Rome’s taxi drivers are a lugubrious lot at the best of times, but the one I had the other day was even more morose than usual. “This place is worse than Burkina Faso,” he said, as the cab rattled over pockmarked roads on the outskirts of the city. “The politicians are all as bad as each other. It’s depressing.” Maniacal drivers hurtled past us on an avenue that was full of potholes, its verges strewn with rubbish.
He had a point. After seven years of living in Rome, I still love the city. But I’m dismayed to see its exquisite beauty being eroded each day by a thousand acts of neglect and thoughtlessness. Graffiti is daubed on every wall – not the clever, artful murals and stencils that you can see in other cities, but mindless tagging. In an alley close to where I work, somebody regularly tosses to the ground used adult nappies. Abandoned, rusting bicycles are everywhere, chained to poles or dumped in corners. The developing world levels of
degrado, or decay, are documented by a popular website called “Roma Fa Schifo” – Rome Is Disgusting. Bins overflow with rubbish, wooden benches are broken and the roads and pavements are crumbling – a direct result, we learnt recently, of public officials taking massive bribes in return for letting contracting companies use substandard materials for maintenance and repairs. “I admit that I was less than attentive and more than once I turned a blind eye to the number of workers assigned to the job and to the quality of the materials,” one official, recently arrested, told the police this week.
There are glimmers of hope amid the squalor and despair.
Fed up with the hopeless inaction of the authorities, Romans are starting to take matters into their own hands. Small groups are banding together to clean up parks and gardens, collect rubbish and do all the jobs that the council is supposed to do, but doesn’t.
Running through Villa Sciarra, one of the city’s lesser-known parks, I found the path blocked by a jungle of vegetation. Struggling along the trail in the opposite direction was a middleaged man walking his dog. “The council have abandoned this place. They do nothing. A group of us locals is going to start clearing the paths,” he said, stepping over a fallen tree.
Similar do-it-yourself initiatives are popping up all around the city. It’s a start, but it’s going to take more than a few well-meaning volunteers to turn Rome around. I’m afraid I will not be holding my breath for better administration in 2016. Wolves have been central to the mythology of Italy ever since the days of Romulus and Remus – and, before them, the Etruscans. But the predators were persecuted for centuries and by the Seventies the population had been reduced to fewer than 100 individuals. Now, the wolf is back with a vengeance.
The latest census suggests that there are at least 1,600, and perhaps as many as 1,900, roaming the Alps and the Apennines. The species started to recover after it was given protection by law in 1971. Another key part in its resurgence is the fact that vast tracts of farmland and pasture in Italy have reverted to forest in the past few decades – the result of the depopulation of rural areas and the closure of small farms.
Forest covered 18 per cent of Italy in 1945; now it blankets around 35 per cent, according to the National Inventory of Forests. The woods teem with fallow deer, roe deer and wild boar – all of which provide a ready supply of food for the growing numbers of Canis lupus.
It is going to be another busy year
for the leader of the world’s 1.2 billion Catholics. Pope Francis is due to make apostolic visits to Mexico and Poland, while trips to Armenia, Kosovo and possibly his native Argentina are also on the cards. But whatever this most dynamic of pontiffs gets up to in 2016, don’t expect singing to feature high on the list. On Thursday he told an audience of 6,000 young choristers that he had a terrible voice – “like a donkey”.
We should be grateful. The Pope is currently engaged in his “Year of Mercy”, which is marked this month with the publication of a book-length interview with him. And anyone sparing others caterwauling certainly dispenses a small mercy.