In Rome, It’s Same Old Story: Congestion, Crime, Confusion

Bedecked for spring with colorful sprays of azaleas and pickpockets, Mama Roma observed a new birthday not long ago, troubled by old complaints: Is the Eternal City governable? Is it livable? Is it safe?

Romans and visitors wondered as both, con molto brio , marked April 21, 753 BC. On that day, legend says and Rome believes, Romulus and Remus, adopted sons of a providential wolf, laid the foundation of what would become one of the world’s most beloved cities.

In intervening centuries of splendor and sack, the city’s administration, along with the security of Rome’s people, have always been paramount civic preoccupations. Juvenal satirized imperial Rome’s urban mess 19 centuries ago. Popes, consuls and emperors employed a gamut of guardians, from walls to geese, in futile attempts at keeping the barbarians at bay.

Today is no different. In many aspects, a city that was once capital of the world is now Third World. If, as ever, Rome’s beauty is unsurpassed, it is also tarnished.

As it passed its 2,742nd birthday, Rome quite literally, had no city government. The mayor had quit after being accused of taking kickbacks on school lunches, and wrangling politicians had been unable to find a successor.

In the piazza before a city hall designed by Michelangelo for greater pomp and circumstance sits an empty pedestal. One of the city’s most powerful symbols, an equestrian statue of 2nd-Century Emperor Marcus Aurelius, belongs on the pedestal, but like so much of monumental Rome, it was damaged by air pollution. After lengthy restoration, the emperor and his horse are still absent from their place in the piazza. Debate rages over the future of the world’s oldest bronze statue.

“We are the doctors, and we have cured the patient,” said Alessandra Melucco, the chief restorer. “What happens next is a political decision, but we know that if the statue is again displayed outdoors, it will die.”

Visitors are often disappointed, but Romans are by now inured to the endless monumental restorations that are so much a part of both the city’s travail and its splendor. The continued absence of Marcus Aurelius from public view is muted this spring by the return of the Arch of Constantine and Trajan’s Column from years of envelopment in restorers’ cocoons. Other favorites, including the Trevi Fountain and the Pantheon, are newly encased in scaffolding.

Of particular concern this year to the tourist hordes that are as much a fixture of Roman spring as the reopening of outdoor trattorie is a sharp rise in petty crime. It is no secret that 20th-Century vandals are inside the gates. Watch your purse and stay off the No. 64 bus to the Vatican.

Crimes of violence are still atypical, but purse snatchers, pickpockets and burglars are among the busiest of all Romans: They strike at an average of one every 15 minutes.

Tanja Trabost, a long-time British resident, had a tough March: She was mugged in Trastevere, her pocketbook was picked on a bus and her apartment was burgled. An American woman whose tire went flat on the historic Old Appian Way was delighted when a courtly Italian stopped to help. He jacked up the car, removed the flat, took her purse and drove off.

Police, reporting a 25% increase in petty crime, blame heroin addicts in general and, in particular, bands of South Americans, Yugoslavs, North Africans and Gypsies. About 2,175 petty thieves were arrested in the first quarter of 1989, nearly half of them foreigners.

“People are getting worried, beginning to feel unsafe,” said Vittorio Sgroi, the ranking criminal judge for Rome. Jammed buses like the No. 64 that ferry Romans and tourists around the choked city center are favorite targets of the pickpockets.

A British couple were injured in a mugging last month, but even counting such incidents, Rome remains a unique open-air museum as safe as it is alluring. Among the American visitors who spent a total of nearly 2 million nights in Rome last year, 877 suffered the theft of their passports.

“Petty crimes are more by stealth than violence,” said U.S. Consul General Dudley G. Sipprelle. “In my three years here, we haven’t had a single American hospitalized as a result of a mugging or robbery. My 76-year-old mother from Los Angeles just wandered all over the city for nine days without any trouble. Of course she didn’t ride the buses, and she didn’t carry all her documents or money when there was no need for them.”

What is galling about Rome for residents and visitors alike is that it lags woefully behind other European capitals in infrastructural improvements. These have not kept pace with a growing population.

Rome, whose population has swelled by persistent migration from the countryside since World War II, is the only major European capital that is still growing. Services of all sorts lag: roads, schools, public transport, hospitals, parking. Tiberius got dispatches quicker from Gaul than today’s Romans receive letters from relatives in the United States. And how many other metropolises of 3 million these days have telephone numbers ranging anywhere from four to eight digits?

Rome’s arteries are so hardened that expert Bernard Winkler has been summoned from West Germany to mastermind yet one more effort to conquer the city’s 2,000-year-old traffic jam. Winkler earnestly promised that vehicular order “will be my Christmas present to the city this year.”

“Rome’s current difficulties are the consequence of a sharp decline of the city in the last 20 or 30 years,” Deputy Prime Minister Gianni De Michelis noted over a cup of inky espresso one recent morning. “Other European cities like Paris, Frankfurt and Milan have gone one way, closer to Europe. Rome has gone the other. More and more, it is like a Third World capital.

“In two or three decades of great change in Europe, nothing was done to prepare Rome for a new way of life as an urban center,” De Michelis added.

Proposals to modernize local governments with clearer lines of authority are pending in Parliament--and have been for years.

The rites of this Roman spring also were leavened by a juicy scandal at City Hall, where Mayor Pietro Giubilo resigned after he and 31 others were accused of corruption by an investigating magistrate.

Other magistrates are probing allegations of corruption in the traffic police, the city bus company and the municipal licensing and housing departments. The knaves, if they are uncovered, can only be featherbedding descendants of petty Roman functionaries who tried the patience of the Caesars.