Pilgrims Coming to Rome, Ready or Not

It took 20 years, but restorers this month finally finished cleaning and polishing every inch of the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel--right on schedule for the Holy Year that will draw millions of Roman Catholic pilgrims here starting Christmas Eve.

A few blocks away, however, the race against time is not over. A project to rebuild the Piazza del Risorgimento is going down to the Christmas deadline, blocking streets, snarling traffic and leaving Francesco Ansuini to dread what further chaos will erupt if the pilgrims arrive first.

“It’s always the same,” muttered the businessman, who lost his parking place when work on the piazza began this summer. “Just before a big event, the mayor wakes up and begins to build this and begins to fix that. Rome has become one giant construction site. The city is paralyzed.”

The chapel and the piazza are among hundreds of projects lurching toward completion in Rome’s biggest make-over since the Fascist era. As basilicas, fountains, palazzos and statues emerge from cages of scaffolding and ages of grime, many Romans say they have never seen their city so dazzling--or so tied up in knots.

The countdown to the Holy Year has featured a lost battle by advocates of mass rail transportation and a feud over an underground garage for pilgrims dubbed by Romans “God’s parking lot.” And it has brought out the best and the worst of a city that seems determined to preserve both its ancient cultural treasures and modern traffic jams.

All this is good news and bad news for the estimated 26 million pilgrims and other visitors poised for the biggest peacetime invasion of Rome in its history. The yearlong Vatican celebrations of the 2,000th anniversary of Christ’s birth will run until Jan. 6, 2001.

Travelers will find a dramatic array of color on the freshly scrubbed travertine facade of St. Peter’s Basilica, the reopened Golden House of Emperor Nero and visible new archeological digs covering 15,000 square feet of the Roman and Imperial forums.

But those coming early should beware: Scores of streets, churches and tourist attractions, including a bone-dry Trevi Fountain, are still under repair and fenced off by ubiquitous, in-your-face orange plastic mesh. Last week in the Basilica of St. Mary Major, priests heard confession over the clatter of maintenance work while a marble polisher climbed down from her scaffold to shoo an out-of-town Italian couple away from the tomb of Pope Nicholas IV.

“It’s so disappointing; they don’t look anywhere near done,” said Cynthia Kravette, a 27-year-old Seattle social worker who visited Rome last week to beat the Holy Year crowds.

Critics of Mayor Francesco Rutelli contend that he spent too much of the Italian treasury’s $2-billion Holy Year allotment for cleaning landmarks that will only get dirty again and not enough on promised subway and rail lines that would have decongested Rome’s narrow streets. Most of the rail plans were abandoned.

Some transportation projects that survived--including 18 new parking lots outside the city center and expanded rail shuttle service between St. Peter’s Square and Rome’s northern suburbs--won’t be finished this year.

The delays have undermined the city’s radical decree banning private tour buses inside the Aurelian Walls that protected ancient Rome. The ban is being diluted in negotiations with the Vatican and tour bus companies, but not enough to satisfy bus drivers who have threatened to strike.

In any case, tour operators say, the many pilgrims arriving in tour groups will probably have to split up and make their own way in a city of 3 million people that is normally clogged each day by 2 million cars, 350,000 motorbikes and an overburdened bus system.

“Romans know that the pilgrims will come anyway,” said Father Paul Robichaud, a resident American priest. “There’s a certain attitude here that Rome is Rome and if you want to come badly enough, you come on Rome’s terms.”

Indeed, Rome has a history of being under-prepared. In 1300, Pope Boniface VIII declared the first Holy Year to satisfy unexpected crowds of pilgrims who had converged here from across Europe on a rumor that they would get indulgences--reductions of the time due to be spent in purgatory for already-forgiven sins.

Holy Years, also called Jubilees, are adapted from an ancient Hebrew tradition of forgiving debts every 50 years. Catholicism’s Holy Years are declared by the Vatican every 25 years. An earthquake left the city unable to accommodate hundreds of thousands of pilgrims who showed up in 1350. A century later, 172 pilgrims were crushed to death on an overcrowded Tiber River bridge.

The ease of air travel and popularity of Pope John Paul II are powerful draws this time--along with the traditional promise of indulgences. In addition to his weekly audiences, the pope has scheduled 76 public appearances at the Vatican and in Rome, starting with the opening of the Holy Door of St. Peter’s on Christmas Eve.

Rome is counting on 4,000 extra police and 50,000 young volunteers to keep order. Twenty-three city agencies will monitor papal events, crowds, traffic, trash collection and power supplies around the clock from a high-tech Situations Room.

“I don’t foresee a catastrophe,” said Giovanni Negri, a member of the Lay Observatory of the Jubilee, a watchdog group of citizens that monitors the planning. “I do foresee a slow agony and deterioration of the city.”

Negri is a leading critic of Mayor Rutelli’s failure to make good on plans, unveiled in mid-1995, to build 250 miles of new rail lines by the Holy Year, including a cross-town subway line linking the basilicas of St. Peter and St. John Lateran.

In a book called “Italy: The Do-Nothing Country” and in an interview, Negri said the city’s Holy Year planning agency gradually lost power in a bureaucratic struggle as time to build ran out. He blamed the absence of a strong mediator to resolve conflicting proposals from the city, the national government, the state railway company and other overlapping authorities.

City officials say they were slowed by ancient underground ruins that were exposed during rail construction, cumbersome bidding rules imposed after corruption scandals of the early 1990s and, above all, a delay in funding from the national government.

“We didn’t get a lira until September 1997,” said Guido Bertolaso, the mayor’s top deputy for Jubilee preparations.

Amid fading hope of moving masses of pilgrims by rail, the Vatican rushed to finish a six-level parking garage for 108 pilgrim buses and 800 cars on its territory, provoking further conflict.

The trouble started in August when archeologists found the frescoed walls of a 2nd century villa--it initially was thought to be the house of Nero’s murderous mother, Agrippina, who lived a century earlier--in the path of a ramp to the garage. Work on the ramp stopped while a divided national government debated what’s more important: preserving every remnant of Rome’s imperial past or building modern amenities to ease the pilgrims’ journey?

Last week, the government decided to go ahead with the ramp, siding with the Vatican and defying noisy street protests by preservationists and foes of tour buses. But the delay means that the garage cannot operate at full capacity until sometime next year.

The dispute has left a bitter taste for some Romans, who question why their city is footing half the $45-million bill for a Vatican garage--one containing a restaurant and shops that will drain tourist income from city coffers. “Italy is not really a secular state,” one city official said.

Rutelli dismisses such criticism, along with most other complaints about Jubilee preparations.

“I don’t think Romans are being any different from their usual argumentative, disenchanted selves,” he said recently.

The mayor cites polls showing that, despite their grumbling, 60% of his constituents view the Holy Year as a “positive event” and 80% want the parking ramp finished.

“Sure it’s positive, positive for the pilgrims,” said Pietro Rossini, 23, who runs a Christmas candy stand in Piazza Navona. “And when this chaos is over and the pilgrims leave, maybe it will be positive for us too. At least we’ll be able to go back to the familiar chaos we had until a couple of years ago.”