\n<\/p>\n
Rome hopes to welcome swimmers back to the River Tiber within five years, the city\u2019s mayor has announced, drawing inspiration from Paris, where the Seine was reopened for public bathing this summer for the first time in a century.<\/p>\n
During a visit on Thursday to the Osaka Expo in Japan, Roberto Gualtieri said a working group had been set up to study the feasibility of the clean-up project.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe are pleased to have already established that this is an entirely achievable goal: within five years, we will be able to swim in the Tiber,\u201d Gualtieri said.<\/p>\n
But the Italian media and experts reacted with scepticism, suggesting it could take rather longer to reduce current pollution to an acceptable level, particularly in a country where public works can have notoriously lengthy timescales.<\/p>\n
Until the 1960s, Romans regularly swam in the river, but pollution prompted the authorities to introduce restrictions. Today, swimming is strictly prohibited, with fines running into the hundreds of euros, though a longstanding New Year\u2019s Day tradition survives in which divers plunge from one of Rome\u2019s bridges into the chilly waters below.<\/p>\n
Gualtieri has said that because pollution rates in the Tiber are lower than those previously recorded in the Seine, the Roman operation, if it went ahead, would be cheaper than its \u20ac1.4bn (\u00a31.2bn) Parisian precursor.<\/p>\n
Yet, the Italian capital\u2019s river is far from pristine. In April, scientists from the Tara Microplastics mission published findings on European waterway pollution that showed the Tiber had an average of three microplastic particles per cubic metre. That may be well below the more than 20 particles per cubic metre recorded in India\u2019s Ganges, but it is still far from reassuring.<\/p>\n
Further research in September 2024 by Italy\u2019s Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) revealed that the Tiber carried more floating waste \u2013 mostly plastic \u2013 into the sea than any other Italian river, alongside worrying concentrations of ammonia and faecal bacteria.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe health risks linked to pollution in the Tiber and in inland waters are extremely high,\u201d Alessandro Miani, the president of the Italian Society of Environmental Medicine, told the news website Roma Today. \u201cThe presence of faecal bacteria such as Escherichia coli<\/em> can trigger gastrointestinal infections in humans, with symptoms including diarrhoea and vomiting. Contact with contaminated water can also cause skin and eye infections, leading to rashes and eye irritation.\u201d<\/p>\n The Paris project, meanwhile, was decades in the making. Although the Seine was used for swimming events during the 2024 Olympics, concerns over water quality persisted. Several events were postponed because of high E coli<\/em> levels, while some athletes took precautionary medication before competing.<\/p>\n skip past newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Sign up to Headlines Europe<\/span><\/p>\n A digest of the morning’s main headlines from the Europe edition emailed direct to you every week day<\/p>\n Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n All in all, the Italian media has been unconvinced about the Tiber\u2019s mooted renaissance. \u201cThe road to making the Tiber swimmable in five years is anything but downhill. For now, it remains a distant goal,\u201d wrote Roma Today.<\/p>\n In late July, when Gualtieri first raised the prospect of making the river swimmable, the national daily La Repubblica ran with the headline: \u201cA swimmable Tiber? A long and costly journey \u2013 if it ever begins.\u201d<\/p>\n The paper pointed to a far smaller project \u2013 making the lake in Rome\u2019s EUR district fit for bathing \u2013 that carries a price tag of about \u20ac8m and a timeline of at least five years. \u201cThe Tiber will take far longer,\u201d La Repubblica concluded.<\/p>\n Reuters contributed to this report.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Rome hopes to welcome swimmers back to the River Tiber within five years, the city\u2019s mayor has announced, drawing inspiration from Paris, where the Seine was reopened for public bathing this summer for the first time in a century. During a visit on Thursday to the Osaka Expo in Japan, Roberto Gualtieri said a working<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20641,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[3287,4397,2458,8835,6001,12691,12689,12690,637],"class_list":{"0":"post-20640","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-claim","9":"tag-italy","10":"tag-mayors","11":"tag-met","12":"tag-rome","13":"tag-scepticism","14":"tag-swimmable","15":"tag-tiber","16":"tag-years"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=20640"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20640\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/20641"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=20640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=20640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=20640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}