How Rome’s rubbish became a political problem

‘Excommunication,’ reads a stone plaque on the wall of the church of St Theodore in Rome, ‘and a fine of 200 gold ducats for any person who should dare to unload… waste of any kind and cause a stink outside these precincts.’ This threat might have worked when the plaque was erected in 1703, but it certainly doesn’t work now. A few paces down the street, a waist-high pile of stinking rubbish bags festers in the autumn sunlight, pecked at by seagulls. In Rome, even the rubbish is eternal.

Italy’s capital is strewn with litter — geological layers of the stuff. In a pile of last year’s crumbled leaves by my house on the Tiber embankment I found a beer bottle with a sell-by date of September 2020. Wild boar — Rome’s equivalent of London’s urban foxes — have been invading outlying districts to feast on rubbish. In May a family of boar were filmed attacking a woman in a supermarket car park and stealing her shopping. But rubbish is not just unsightly and unhygienic — it’s also become a major political issue that raises profound questions about whether Italy’s institutions are fit to govern.

Over the summer, anger over piles of uncollected refuse brought thousands of protestors out on to the streets. Hundreds more turned out at new landfill sites to protest against the dumping of Rome’s waste in their back yards. Clearing rubbish was a key issue on which the former mayor, Virginia Raggi of the radically anti-establishment Five Star Movement, was elected in 2016. Her failure to tackle the problem led to her downfall in elections this month.

Rome is also conspicuously full of trash collectors. They career down the narrow backstreets of Trastevere in miniature Transit-van-sized dustcarts and nose around the city’s squares nightly in noisy sweeping machines.