ITALY: The Semi-Eternal City

The first Roman to protest that his city was being despoiled by wanton demolition of ancient monuments and tasteless modern construction is lost to history, but two things about him are fairly sure: he made his complaint in Latin, and lived in the days of the Caesars. Last week, joining a long line of outraged traditionalists ranging from the Emperor Majorian (A.D. 457-461) to Pope Pius II (1458-64), famed Italian Novelist Alberto Moravia lamented: “The Dark Ages and the Barbarians are come again. But this time they have modern means. This is the end of Rome.”

Moravia was moved to wrath by municipal Rome’s newest effort to cope with traffic jams that make an eternity of crossing the Eternal City. Plagued by an ever-growing (up 400,000 since World War II), ever-moving population, Rome’s traffic planners route fleets of Fiats and thundering herds of motor scooters through narrow alleys designed for carriages and litters. Whole areas of Rome have become all but impossible to reach by car; so congested is the area around the Pantheon that many cab drivers flatly refuse to take passengers there.

The Voiceless Trees. Awakening to the fact that next year’s Olympic Games will add another 100,000 agile foreigners to the daily traffic scrimmage, Rome’s city hall decreed its biggest postwar street construction program: four huge underpasses, hopefully scheduled for completion by next July. Clearing the way for the underpasses, workmen chopped down hundreds of towering trees along the banks of the Tiber and on the fringes of Rome’s biggest park, the Villa Borghese.

Gazing resentfully at raw stumps, gaping holes and blocked-off streets, Rome’s citizens let out a noise that could be heard distinctly above the traffic’s roar. Tunneling for one underpass, charged critics, would irretrievably weaken the 16th century gate at the Piazza del Popolo, as well as whole sections of the city wall built by the Emperor Aurelian (A.D. 270-275). “Our trees are being slaughtered,” added Columnist Indro Montanelli. “because they have neither voices nor votes. We are being drowned in a wave of cement.”

The Overshadowing Ruins. Though Romans have been crying for several years for drastic solutions to the traffic problem, it is only within recent months that the city government has devised an overall “regulatory plan,” which is intended to shift much of the city’s business—and most of its traffic—away from Rome’s historic center to the suburbs. In the meantime, profiteers and speculators have been free to make Rome’s outskirts a mixture of slums and squalid forests of ugly, jerry-built apartments.

There were some who questioned the idea of a traffic-free interior city. “Rome cannot live in the shadow of its ruins,” sighed // Tempo. “Rome is not Pompeii, but a living metropolis.”