Why Criticizing Rome That Way Won’t Help To Make It Better
The fact that the Eternal city is going through a rough time is not in doubt. From the outbreak of the Mafia Capitale scandal last October its problems have only grown wider and now the city is facing with a series of unpleasant circumstances tied to transit and other services.
As citizen born and bred in Italy I’ve always been particularly severe toward Rome and its political management, which I consider the flawless symbol of that political culture — patronage, nepotism, bureaucracy, mafia style mentality, corruption — that has ruined and is ruining Italy for several years.
Mostly, when I run into an article or an exposé about city’s abysmal state of some services, buildings and standard of living, I agree with them. And yet something a bit weird happened over the last month. Rome has suddenly become a laughingstock, getting an astonishing number of harsh comments by some of the most important world’s news organizations.
In a feature article appeared on its website, the agency press Reuters branded Rome as dirty and disorganized while The Telegraph warned that “Rome is on the verge of collapse and needs urgent repair.” Alongside, Bloomberg posted a video link emblematically titled “Why Rome Ranks at European Bottom for Quality of Life,” in relation to a report by the European Commission that ranked the city in the ends of the 28 EU capitals list for the efficiency of city services.
Nearly a week later, The New York Times published a grim but truthful article by its Italian correspondent Gaia Pianigiani and, after having aroused an internal debate, the daily launched via Twitter a survey about “quality of services and quality of life there” which collected several tough feedbacks from both tourists and inhabitants.
For a variety of reasons, the great attention span the Anglo-Saxon media outlets directed toward Rome has raised a domestic debate involving all the main dailies of the country.
Generally, it is unanimously acknowledged that Rome is no longer an idyllic place to take a Roman Holiday, but rather a metropolis in chronic decline as a result of a toxic mix of corruption, debt, poor administration, and shabby infrastructure.
When this tide of panic drastically dropped, and while the mayor Ignazio Marino was reshuffling his executive council promising general improvements, I decided to read each piece of writing to figure out if media representation of Rome coincided with the effective reality.
And the answer is yes, but only in part. Much of the criticism media outlets have directed against it find some response in reality. Rome is really dirty, disorganized, and chaotic. Transit and other services are in a comatose state, the urban divide between the peripheral areas and the city center is striking, the executive council is on the the brink of collapse and the city’s mayor is frowned upon by his political party.
Fact is, who isn’t familiar with the city got a biased doomsday depiction — trash bags on every corner, pickpockets everywhere, rabid gulls, and so on — that it’s not exactly neither sincere nor helpful. The reason is quite simple: as any modern sprawling city, Rome is dealing with the same pattern of troubles other world’s main cities are having, and its complexity cannot be simplified or attributed only to its state of decline.
Surely, Rome has plenty of troubles but it isn’t the hell on earth described. Emphasizing merely what is wrong or what doesn’t work, it creates a manufactured partition which divides the whole world in upright citizens and criminals who don’t abide by laws and regulations. The same partition that, over the last months, has resulted in a fight between the poor which involved entire suburban districts.
The reality, however, isn’t just black-and-white and what Rome really needs isn’t more moral panic but a thorough and well-rounded reframing of that policy structure highlighted by the Middle-earth investigation a few months ago, which even today rules the city making the front page of all the major dailies in the country — as in the recent case of the president of the Rome tourist port and four other.
After the outbreak of the Mafia Capitale outrage, in fact, the city’s political response was the worst ever. Instead of starting a profound process of renovation, the senior political figures have opted to pursue the same approach they’ve always had, launching an Olympic bid for 2024, building overpriced stations of the Metro C line, planning for a brand new football stadium and announcing an extraordinary Jubilee Year for 2016. All activities which are known to be a matter solely for that mob’s long reach whose tentacles are virtually over each corner of the city and that has been around since decades.
Who criticizes, especially if it’s a strong voice, has the duty to make people as aware as possible and to explain who-when-what-where-why this happened and it keeps happening. For this reason, inviting the readers to denounce decay situations throughout the city and criticizing the mismanagement just looking at its effects won’t help Rome to be a better place in a near future.
