In Rome, scaffolding and construction add to the hustle and bustle

Still, it's far too early to declare this spate of work transformational for a city where daily life has long been complicated by poor public services, corruption, heavy traffic, mass tourism and the inheritance of Roman ruins and aging infrastructure.

“The funded projects will certainly bring benefits, if they are done correctly and on schedule,” said Luca Dal Poggetto, an analyst with the Fondazione Openpolis, a non-profit watchdog tracking the EU recovery funds in Italy. “But they do not represent by themselves the panacea for all the ills.”

The mayor's office in Rome did not respond to a query from Courthouse News seeking comment about all the work taking place around the city.

In Rome, as across the rest of the country, Dal Poggetto said it will be difficult to say how much good the recovery funds have done because Italian administrators generally do a poor job identifying what work needs to be completed in the first place. Without this metric, he said it is hard to measure improvement.

There's also a good chance the building spree won't live up to its promises because many projects may not get done due to Brussels' insistence that work paid with recovery funds must be completed by the end of 2026.

Data shows only about 16% of the funds slated for Rome and the surrounding region have been spent so far, according to an analysis by Fondazione Openpolis.

Revamp yields mixed reactions

Rosario Pavia, an urban planner and author of a new book called “Roma Babilonia” (“Rome Babylon”), believes the money pouring in from Brussels is being scattered across the city without an overarching plan. Even bigger projects such as the piazza redesigns, he said, are modest in scale and beauty.

“This mayor's administration has begun investing in the redevelopment of the city, but we're only at the beginning,” he said. “These projects are modest because there isn't a general vision for the city.”

Pavia said the EU funds would have been better spent on big-ticket projects, such as turning the Tiber River or the remains of the Aurelian Walls that protected ancient Rome into grand urban parks.

“They could have been focused on some really important projects for the city,” he said.

Several million euros in EU funds are being spent on the Tiber to create five new riverside parks and to repair damaged quays. Likewise, the funds are being used to restore several sections of the Aurelian Walls. But he said the projects fall far short of transformational.

On the streets, people expressed a mixture of frustration, pride and cynicism when they spoke about all the activity and the headaches they are creating for such a hectic city.

“You can see the improvements,” said Alessandro Trani, a lawyer and artist. “There's the jubilee, so there is more money being invested.”

He walked up the street from his law office in central Rome and strolled into a park on Oppian Hill, one of Rome's seven hills. He said the park showed signs of being taken care of better.

At the park's entrance, signs advertised a project to restore a fresco discovered inside a buried gallery under the Bath of Trajan, a giant bathing and leisure complex in ancient Rome. About 4 million euros ($4.3 million) in EU funds are slated for this project, which will include making the site accessible to the public and building a bookshop.

But Trani wasn't naive about this flood of money fixing Rome.

“Traffic problems, keeping the streets clean, maintaining the roads,” he said. “These are Rome's chronic problems.”

He explained that Rome is complicated to manage with its ancient buildings, old sewer, water and light systems and ruins underfoot.

“It's a never-ending excavation here,” he said. “When you try to do some work, the ground falls in.”

Rome's metro system is a famous example of the difficulties of digging through the ruins of ancient Rome. In his 1972 autobiographical film “Roma,” Federico Fellini famously captured the complexity when an engineer takes a crew of documentary filmmakers into a metro line under construction in the “unpredictable” subsoil of Rome. Already back then, the work had been delayed for years by archaeological finds and bureaucracy.

“We simply wanted to solve a question of urban traffic with a metro,” the engineer says in the film, “as in Munich, Dublin; but here the subsoil has eight layers; we have become archaeologists, speleologists.”

Lines have been added since 1972, but the work has been excruciatingly slow and Romans complain how the metro still doesn't reach many neighborhoods.

In truth, many Romans say they aren't looking for big changes to their beloved city.

“Rome, you see, isn't like Milan, which has changed,” a taxi driver said as he cruised with ease through the city on a recent Sunday. “Rome never changes and that's a good thing.”

But he quickly added: “We do need to have more social services. Help for old people, cultural centers where young people can go and not spend a lot.”

Capuano, the urban design architect, said the beauty of Rome can be explained by how it hasn't undergone dramatic makeovers.

“The only period in modernity when you saw a radical change was during the fascist period,” she said. “Otherwise, Rome has been a city of stratification. There is a palimpsest: You build something on the top of something else and this is what makes Rome great. None of these things are going to completely change the city but we don't even want to have the city completely changed.”

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

Follow @cainburdeau