Summertime Yawner : Rome Love Tribute a Star-Crossed Flop

In Italian, Rome is Roma ; spelled backwards, it becomes amor , celebrated here for thousands of years.

Late last month, after great deal of planning and fanfare, the city’s cultural authorities opened a tribute to the mysteries of love, from the divine to the profane, in hope of enlivening the dog days of summer.

An Arch of Amor has been put up on the west bank of the Tiber and on it are emblazoned the words, “Love City--Live Love.” Beyond the arch--entrance fee, $3--is a small theme park dedicated to “The Decameron,” Giovanni Boccaccio’s 14th-Century collection of often-erotic tales that are often cited, along with the works of his friend Petrarch, as the foundation of the Italian Renaissance.

The park, lit by delicate pink and blue spots, is being promoted throughout Rome as an absolute must for those of tender heart who want to be inspired, emboldened, turned-on or merely titillated.

So far, though, amor , Love City-style, has not been a success.

Despite heavy promotion--”Images of Love,” “Find Your Amorous Identity in the Avenue of Lovers”--the few Romans willing to stay in the city’s summer heat apparently don’t think much of the park.

On a recent moonlit night, when the turnstiles showed that a mere 200 couples had ventured beneath the Arch of Amor, the only real demonstration of affection that could be seen involved two young men on a bench along the Avenue of Lovers.

In a booth dedicated to “Love Betrayed” was a display of sedate quotations about fidelity, attributed to such noted authorities as Demosthenes, Euripedes, Plutarch and Goethe. Most of the visitors yawned; a few complained that they had passed up the chance to go to the Roma-Ascoli soccer game in the nearby Olympic stadium.

For the record, Roma won, 3-0

While love’s labors seemed lost in Rome, the most uplifting of human emotions was also taking a beating in romantic Verona, the home of Romeo and Juliet.

At the height of the summer tourist season, with 18 million foreign visitors counted in Italy since July 1, the Verona authorities closed the castles of the Montagues and Capulets, whose impetuous offspring inspired Shakespeare to write “Romeo and Juliet.”

The authorities explained that they want to turn Juliet’s birthplace into a restaurant and Romeo’s into a theater.

If not love, at least sex also was a loser at the very edge of the Vatican.

For six years, a pornographic movie house called the Mercury has been in operation on the Via di Porta Castelli, just a few hundred yards from St. Peter’s Basilica. Its proximity has been an embarrassment to the Vatican, but church authorities did little more than complain unofficially.

Now, however, the clients, largely aging males, have seen the last of lust on the Mercury screen. A group called Intervision, with backing from Roman Catholic financiers in Belgium, has taken over the theater. Beginning in mid-September it will feature a French-made documentary called “Eternal Rome,” recounting the stories of Sts. Peter and Paul to a musical background of Bach, Mozart and Handel.

Alain Stocker, a Swiss and spokesman for the buyers, said: “We’re putting in 46 computerized projectors, a giant screen and earphones for the audience, who will be able to see the film in eight languages.”

Among the eight languages will be “Polish, of course,” said Stocker, perhaps in the hope that the Polish-born Pope John Paul II may one day be in the audience.

Women of the local parish appeared pleased about the end of the porno movies at the Mercury. There was, however, one dissenter.

“The Mercury as a porno cinema was destined to end,” said Maria Luisa Messeri, author of a book on the Vatican neighborhood. “We hoped to turn the place into a culture center. But now, instead, we’ll just have another meeting point for those mastodon-sized tourist buses, a center aimed at Catholic consumerism.”

For the better part of a year now, Rome’s women traffic police officers have been shifting from style-less uniforms seemingly tailored for overweight men to something more chic.

A competition was held among Italy’s top fashion designers to dress them up. The celebrated houses of Fendi and Gucci won, and all the policewomen are now turned out as stylishly as models on the Via Condotti.

Fendi did the revealing skirts and the jackets, trimmed in navy blue and white, and the pert white berets, beneath which hair may be worn tucked up or cascading down. Gucci did the voluminous navy blue shoulder bags.

The new look in law enforcement may be a mixed blessing, according to one officer who works the Piazza di Spagna. Before she donned her Fendi uniform, she said, young traffic offenders tended to respond promptly to her stern warnings. Now, she said, they grin, crack jokes and make passes.

She said she grins back and writes tickets, as always.