ROME (CN) — Workers in hard hats clamber around the stone palaces on Capitolium, a hilltop square designed by Michelangelo which was, in its time, the symbolic heart of ancient Rome with a temple to Jupiter.
Down below in Piazza Venezia, a central hub of modern Italy with the humongous Vittoriano national monument, traffic is snarled by excavations for a long-delayed new metro station.
Rome is in the midst of a major uplift as the Vatican City celebrates a jubilee year drawing millions of Roman Catholic pilgrims while about 6.3 billion euros ($6.8 billion) rain down on the city from a European Union pandemic recovery fund. Of that, about 500 million euros ($542 million) are going toward projects linked to the jubilee, a special year of pardon for Catholics.
Across the city, hundreds of projects are at various stages of planning and construction in what Mayor Roberto Gualtieri is triumphantly proclaiming a transformational moment of investment into Italy’s capital. He’s named this public works campaign “Roma Si Trasforma” (“Rome Transforms”) and the slogan pops into view at construction sites across the city.
“The Eternal City changes forever,” a city website trumpets.
Monuments, ancient Roman walls and public buildings are getting scrubbed and patched up; pot-holed streets are being repaved and new bike paths plotted; libraries, villas, museums, schools, health clinics and sports facilities are benefitting from makeovers, often with the goal of making them more energy efficient and fit for the digital age.
“This is the cleanest I’ve seen it,” said Tony Dragonetti, a 65-year-old Australian barber who regularly returns to Italy, his birthplace. “The Trevi Fountain — my god, it almost blinded me. I’ve never seen the Trevi Fountain that clean.”
He stood in Piazza Venezia on a recent afternoon and marveled at work to build the metro station. This work — valued at 755 million euros ($819 million) — is being paid through Italian funds rather than the EU recovery money, but it’s still touted as part of Rome’s makeover.
“My family that lives here say that every time they dig they got to stop digging because they’ve found a lot of monuments,” Dragonetti said. “And now they’re building a metro and you think, ‘How the hell can they do that?’”
The new station is indeed an impressive undertaking that blends engineering with archaeology — a reality that’s dogged the development of Rome’s subway system since Benito Mussolini ordered the construction of Linea A, the city’s first metro line in the 1930s. Modern Rome was built atop the ruins of the former imperial city, which reached at its height a population of two million people.
As with previous metro stations, the work under Piazza Venezia is burrowing into the ruins of the Eternal City that lies below. So far, more than 5,380 square feet of ancient structures have been unearthed under Piazza Venezia. When the station finally opens, metro-goers will not only board trains, they’ll also pass through spaces showcasing the new archaeological finds.
All across Rome, projects are popping up and changing the city in subtle and big ways.
“It’s not only big boastful projects with important architectural stars, but it’s also a lot of work that for years has not been done, small works of maintenance,” said Alessandra Capuano, a professor of architecture and urban design at the Sapienza University of Rome. “For many years, there has been a lack of money for all this maintenance work and the city was really falling apart.”
Among the bigger changes is a new pedestrian square in front of Saint Peter’s Square in the Vatican. This open space arose by diverting the hectic traffic running along the Tiber River underground. In another striking overhaul, the large square in front of the central train station has been redesigned, noticeably reducing the volume of traffic.
Still, it’s far too early to declare this spate of work transformational for a city where daily life has long been complicated by poor public services, corruption, heavy traffic, mass tourism and the inheritance of Roman ruins and aging infrastructure.
“The funded projects will certainly bring benefits, if they are done correctly and on schedule,” said Luca Dal Poggetto, an analyst with the Fondazione Openpolis, a non-profit watchdog tracking the EU recovery funds in Italy. “But they do not represent by themselves the panacea for all the ills.”
The mayor’s office in Rome did not respond to a query from Courthouse News seeking comment about all the work taking place around the city.
In Rome, as across the rest of the country, Dal Poggetto said it will be difficult to say how much good the recovery funds have done because Italian administrators generally do a poor job identifying what work needs to be completed in the first place. Without this metric, he said it is hard to measure improvement.
There’s also a good chance the building spree won’t live up to its promises because many projects may not get done due to Brussels’ insistence that work paid with recovery funds must be completed by the end of 2026.
Data shows only about 16% of the funds slated for Rome and the surrounding region have been spent so far, according to an analysis by Fondazione Openpolis.
Revamp yields mixed reactions
Rosario Pavia, an urban planner and author of a new book called “Roma Babilonia” (“Rome Babylon”), believes the money pouring in from Brussels is being scattered across the city without an overarching plan. Even bigger projects such as the piazza redesigns, he said, are modest in scale and beauty.
“This mayor’s administration has begun investing in the redevelopment of the city, but we’re only at the beginning,” he said. “These projects are modest because there isn’t a general vision for the city.”
Pavia said the EU funds would have been better spent on big-ticket projects, such as turning the Tiber River or the remains of the Aurelian Walls that protected ancient Rome into grand urban parks.
“They could have been focused on some really important projects for the city,” he said.
Several million euros in EU funds are being spent on the Tiber to create five new riverside parks and to repair damaged quays. Likewise, the funds are being used to restore several sections of the Aurelian Walls. But he said the projects fall far short of transformational.
On the streets, people expressed a mixture of frustration, pride and cynicism when they spoke about all the activity and the headaches they are creating for such a hectic city.
“You can see the improvements,” said Alessandro Trani, a lawyer and artist. “There’s the jubilee, so there is more money being invested.”
He walked up the street from his law office in central Rome and strolled into a park on Oppian Hill, one of Rome’s seven hills. He said the park showed signs of being taken care of better.
At the park’s entrance, signs advertised a project to restore a fresco discovered inside a buried gallery under the Bath of Trajan, a giant bathing and leisure complex in ancient Rome. About 4 million euros ($4.3 million) in EU funds are slated for this project, which will include making the site accessible to the public and building a bookshop.
But Trani wasn’t naive about this flood of money fixing Rome.
“Traffic problems, keeping the streets clean, maintaining the roads,” he said. “These are Rome’s chronic problems.”
He explained that Rome is complicated to manage with its ancient buildings, old sewer, water and light systems and ruins underfoot.
“It’s a never-ending excavation here,” he said. “When you try to do some work, the ground falls in.”
Rome’s metro system is a famous example of the difficulties of digging through the ruins of ancient Rome. In his 1972 autobiographical film “Roma,” Federico Fellini famously captured the complexity when an engineer takes a crew of documentary filmmakers into a metro line under construction in the “unpredictable” subsoil of Rome. Already back then, the work had been delayed for years by archaeological finds and bureaucracy.
“We simply wanted to solve a question of urban traffic with a metro,” the engineer says in the film, “as in Munich, Dublin; but here the subsoil has eight layers; we have become archaeologists, speleologists.”
Lines have been added since 1972, but the work has been excruciatingly slow and Romans complain how the metro still doesn’t reach many neighborhoods.
In truth, many Romans say they aren’t looking for big changes to their beloved city.
“Rome, you see, isn’t like Milan, which has changed,” a taxi driver said as he cruised with ease through the city on a recent Sunday. “Rome never changes and that’s a good thing.”
But he quickly added: “We do need to have more social services. Help for old people, cultural centers where young people can go and not spend a lot.”
Capuano, the urban design architect, said the beauty of Rome can be explained by how it hasn’t undergone dramatic makeovers.
“The only period in modernity when you saw a radical change was during the fascist period,” she said. “Otherwise, Rome has been a city of stratification. There is a palimpsest: You build something on the top of something else and this is what makes Rome great. None of these things are going to completely change the city but we don’t even want to have the city completely changed.”
Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.