It’s a Jubilee year for the Vatican, but Romans aren’t all so jubilant

“Just look at the conditions of the street,” he said, nodding at the narrow Via del Boschetto outside his cafe paved in bricks. “You are in the Monti district, a top constituency, and if you're not careful where you walk, you'll end up in the hospital because you'll trip and fall.”

Exasperated, he said Rome was treated with “total carelessness.” He regarded all the work around the city as proof, because the renovations should have been completed well before the Jubilee started in December.

“They knew 25 years ago that there was a Jubilee this year,” he scoffed. “I'm 57 years old, not young, and I can tell you I've never seen the city as bad as it has been in the last eight years.”

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Notwithstanding the skepticism, the city's administrators can make a claim that daily life is better than it was just a few years ago and that the Jubilee is helping boost the city’s fortunes.

In 2019, just before Italy was thrown into pandemic lockdowns, the Italian capital felt like it had hit rock bottom.

Italian media routinely issued scathing reports about the city: Potholes were so big they devoured vehicles, weeks of trash piled up on streets and aging city buses were catching on fire. At the time, Rome was led by its first female mayor, Virginia Raggi, and blame was heaped on her.

Raggi came into office in 2016 at just 37 years old with pledges to turn the troubled Italian capital around as she took over from two administrations riddled with corruption.

But she came from a maverick anti-establishment party, the 5-Star Movement, and she was relentlessly attacked. By 2019, her hopes of tackling Rome's problems were in tatters and her popularity in the tank.

Step ahead five years: With EU funds pouring in and the Jubilee in full swing, there are clear improvements taking place under Gualtieri.

“I think that the current mayor has really managed to recover from those problems and is working hard to get the city in better shape,” said Alessandra Capuano, a professor of architecture and urban design at the Sapienza University of Rome, speaking by telephone.

Besides the hundreds of projects funded with EU recovery funds, she pointed to a new waste-to-energy incinerator set to open in 2027. It's being built to handle 600,000 tons of trash a year.

“For many years, we were transporting our garbage to Germany,” she said.

She also highlighted a tram line slated to traverse the historic center, and work on new subway stations. The tram line will make it easier to cross the city, a tricky endeavor because modern Rome still largely reflects the street pattern of ancient Rome, where roads branched out from the hub like bicycle spokes.

“It's usually very easy to go along this radial system, but it is much more difficult to go transversal,” she said. “This tramway is going into the city center and it's going to help traverse the city center.”

Along with these public works, Rome is seeing a strong rise in investment and business interest.

Scenari Immobiliari, an Italian business research firm, recently reported that Rome was second only behind Paris among European capitals for investment flows. Kearney, the Chicago-based global consultancy firm, bumped Rome up six places in its 2024 Global Cities Index, from 37th to 31st.

Il Messaggero, the city's foremost newspaper, is hailing Rome for a surge of new businesses, among them tech startups and the opening of branches by global corporations.

Big spenders, too, are moving in. French celebrity chef Alain Ducasse opened a restaurant last year in the new super-deluxe Hotel Romeo, one of a string of new luxury hotels.

This influx of money and energy is exciting for many Romans, including Alessandro Trani, a lawyer and fine art painter.

Walking down Via Merulana, Trani was thrilled that well-known artists had bought properties in his neighborhood in central Rome called Esquilino, and that art galleries and museums were thriving.

For him, Rome was managing to combine the old and the new and Via Merulana was a perfect example. He pointed to businesses — including bookstores, pizzerias and restaurants, a florist, a knife store —that had survived on the street for decades.

“There's this tradition inside the family where children and grandsons want to carry on these activities,” he said. “These are Romans who have remained right here and yet they've also come up with new things while not abandoning family traditions.”

For him, this showed Rome was still very much alive.

“No real Roman says: 'No, I prefer another city,'” he said. “I've traveled a lot, most of all in Europe. I've gone several times to Paris, London, Vienna, Madrid. To all the capitals. They're beautiful to visit, but I would never leave Rome for any other big city.”

Emphatically, he said with gusto: “Rome will never die! It will survive everything. Our history is thousands of years old, and it's so important that it will never die.”

Courthouse News reporter Cain Burdeau is based in the European Union.

Follow @cainburdeau