Rome Defaced and Degraded: New Mayor Overwhelmed by Problems

I am happy to share with you my latest article just published on Impakter. I spent a long time on this article, after all, it’s all about the city I live in and that I deeply love. It’s so sad to see the state it’s in today. I sincerely hope things will get better as people take things in their own hands…

Is this still Rome, the Eternal City? On a sunny day in mid-April, a rat bit little Marco, a three-year old child, in the leg, near the ankle. He was playing in the park of Villa Giordani, once a lovely place, with some remarkable ruins that were restored in the 1960s, thereby gaining the enviable status of “archeological park”. He was rushed to a public hospital, Umberto I, to be medicated.

IN THE PHOTO: VILLA GIORDANI, THE “MAUSOLEUM”, THE BEST PRESERVED MONUMENT IN THE PARK.  PHOTO CREDIT: ALESSANDRO ZANGRILLI 

What happened next was an angry letter of protest from the Minister of Health Beatrice Lorenzin to Virginia Raggi, Rome’s young new Mayor, an attractive 39-year old lawyer and member of the populist Five Star Movement – fast becoming the largest party in Italy, most recently blamed by the Italian health authorities for a surge in measles (it proposed an anti-vaccination law in 2015).

IN THE PHOTOS: (LEFT) MAYOR VIRGINIA RAGGI,  (RIGHT) MINISTER OF HEALTH BEATRICE LORENZIN PHOTO CREDIT: WIKIPEDIA AND BIOGRAFIE ONLINE

Ms. Lorenzin did not mince her words: “After only one year in government, we do not expect Mayor Raggi to have solved the chronic problems of the budget or traffic, but the city should be at least clean and the urban décor restored.” According to Ms. Lorenzin, “the health emergency that I warned about two years ago requires immediate action against rats, seagulls, the tiger mosquito, not to mention lice and cockroaches.” Quite a list. And Ms. Lorenzin to conclude mournfully: “Who knows what awaits us tomorrow, with the summer at the door.”

Ms. Raggi lost no time to go on television the next day, taking the opportunity to request “special funding” and announcing she had prepared an “Agenda for Rome” that she would “shortly submit” to the government.

Romans, as might be expected, immediately expressed skepticism, asking what she had done with the funding that she already had. A week later, on the 2770th birthday of Rome (April 21, that’s the day Romulus killed his brother Remus and founded the city), she made a speech, doubling down on the notion of an agenda, saying “We have to make a pact with all the citizens, the institutions, tourists, entrepreneurs and the national government. We have to write an Agenda for Rome together.”

What there is in this agenda, nobody knows. And who is writing it is a mystery. But she is good with words: “We are all fully aware of our History, the extraordinary artistic, natural and archaeological heritage that has made Italy’s capital a unique heritage of humanity. We must preserve what has been handed down to us and make it available to the world.”

Meanwhile, Rome’s problems that have been long brewing, some of them for decades, are all coming to a head. And this spring, the Italian mainstream media is full of horror stories. One blogger, listing everyday the photos and news of Rome’s newfound decadence called his blog Roma fa Schifo (Rome Sucks). At least one foreign journalist, Frank Bruni from the New York Times took note as he walked around Rome, appalled by the cigarette butts and the piles of garbage. He called it the “filthy metaphor of Rome“.

IN THE PHOTO: GARBAGE ON A ROMAN SIDEWALK PUBLISHED BY ROMA FA SCHIFO  (ROME SUCKS) BLOG, TAKING AIM AT THE FIVE STAR MOVEMENT’S LATEST “FAKE NEWS” THAT ROME DID NOT HAVE A GARBAGE DISPOSAL EMERGENCY. PHOTO CREDIT: ROMA FA SCHIFO 8 MAY 2017

A HORROR LIST OF ROME’S PROBLEMS:

Wild boars: At first, they went unnoticed, just four of them descending from the mountains two years ago. Now troops of wild boars are regularly spotted in city streets at the foot of Monte Mario, feeding on spilled garbage. The authorities are even considering sterilizing the boars after a motorcyclist met his death in a collision with the animals on the Via Cassia.

See the rest of a very long list on Impakter, click here. 

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Getting Close to the “Darkest Hour”: Ancient Art Destroyed, Lives Lost, A Voice for Freedom Silenced

We are getting close to Mankind’s “darkest hour”. The Voice for Freedom, silenced in Moscow on 27 February, was that of Boris Nemtsov. It was close to midnight, he was gunned down not far from the Kremlin, as he was walking home from a radio interview in which he had dared to take Putin to task for his warmongering in Ukraine.

Nemtsov was a liberal politician, a fighter of corruption, one of the most important leaders in the opposition to Putin. As a young man, he’d been close to Yeltsin, serving as his first deputy minister and many thought that since he was Yeltsin’s right arm, he would succeed him; instead, Putin, Yeltsin’s left arm, the man picked to spy on several of his colleagues, was the one ultimately chosen – with the catastrophic results we all know.

And of course Putin is behind the failed cease-fire in Ukraine. Merkel and Hollande unwittingly played their part: the agreement they brokered was faulty, the rebels quickly took advantage of the loophole and trapped the Ukrainian army.

As to the situation in Iraq, we can only watch with rising horror as ISIS and like-minded terrorist groups in Libya systematically pursue and behead Christians – putting at stake the very survival of Christians among the Muslims – and, as if this were not enough, destroying ancient art in Mosul, proving to the world that they have sunk to the levels of animals.

Yes, indeed, Yeats’ poem of the Second Coming, with its image of the beast, comes to mind:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The “darkest hour” is the phrase coined by Winston Churchill to describe the desperate moment when Britain stood alone against Hitler, as the Nazi forces invaded France in 1940 and the Soviet Union in 1941. The “finest hour” is perhaps one of his most famous speeches, delivered to the House of Commons on 18 June, 1940 two days after France had sought an armistice.

It is probably one of the world’s greatest masterpieces of oratorical art, both defiant and uplifting.

The peroration of that speech, if you substitute references to Britain with the phrases civilization and “human rights”, eerily applies to our situation today.

….However matters may go […], we […] will never lose our sense of comradeship with the [Christians of the Orient] … the Battle of [Human Rights] is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of… civilization. Upon it depends our own […] life, and the long continuity of our institutions… The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us…. If we can stand up to him, all [the world] may be freed and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands.
But if we fail, then the whole world, … including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves, that if [civilization and human rights] last for [another] thousand years, men will still say, This was their finest hour.

What a pity the United Nations continues to be bypassed: our best instrument to avoid war and defend human rights remains sadly unused, as the Big Powers take turns to block the Security Council.

All we have for now are comments from the UN affiliated organizations. Two stand out:

• One made earlier by Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, a Jordanian prince and the first UN human rights chief from the Muslim and Arab world: reacting to the horrific beheadings perpetrated by ISIS, he implored the Security Council to support efforts to overturn ISIS’ “ideology of violence and death” , saying there was no space for it in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. No space at all.

• The other from UNESCO. Irina Bokova, UNESCO’s head, condemned ISIS’ destruction of ancient Assyrian art “as a deliberate attack against Iraq’s millennial history and culture, and an inflammatory incitement to violence and hatred.”

Naturally, the Security Council also condemned ISIS, but it continues to debate the situation in Syria with no resolution in sight, because of Russia’s and China’s threat to block any action with their veto. Authoritarian regimes band together to trample human rights, no surprise there. 

This week, in a New York Times Op-Ed aptly titled “Unshackle the United Nations”, Amnesty International vigorously called for the Big Powers to stop using their veto when human rights were at stake. “2014 was a catastrophic year”, it said, listing human rights abuses in 160 countries and noting that the Security Council wielded their veto power on the sole basis of “vested interests and political expediency.”

Wounded Syria girl treated at a hospital. See NPR article

The world has become more dangerous than ever, a dark place. Very sad…