Rome – The Eternal City has addressed its eternal problem. Rome’s Tiber River has gone from one of the filthiest in Europe to one of the hot spots in a city that has been a hot tourist destination for more than 2,000 years.
It’s no longer just the Tiber. It is called Tevere Village (Tevere is Italian for Tiber), 600-foot-long stretches along both banks that have given the Tiber the air of a Roman Cabo San Lucas.
One hundred beach umbrellas dot a long stretch of fine white sand leading to a swimming pool lined with synthetic grass and lounge chairs. But first you must stop off at the beach bar and order a Campari on ice from the pretty waitresses in sarongs. Then lounge in the modern rattan furniture and look out at the new Tiber.
For me, this was a little like returning to Pompeii and seeing a fully operational city again. The Tiber has always been the black hole of Rome. It’s arguably the most beautiful city in the world, with spectacular monuments, backlit churches and romantic piazzas – with an open sewer going right down the middle of it all.
I remember my first visit to Rome, in 1978. I read in a local paper that a man had accidentally fallen into the Tiber and died. No, he didn’t drown. He died from an ear infection caused by the urine from rats. Ever since, for me the Tiber was as dead as the River Styx.
The last time I was on the Tiber was in the winter of 2003. Before I moved from Rome that March, tons of dead fish had floated to the surface and eels had thrown themselves on the banks, a grisly suicide, but obviously in the mind of an eel preferable to being poisoned to death in the Tiber.
So imagine my surprise this month when I returned to the Tiber and was greeted by a beautiful, bronzed Italian woman sitting poolside in a yellow bikini. The dead eels on the banks were replaced by sunbathers on a sandy beach.
Coming to the river’s rescue was Rome Mayor Walter Veltroni, a bespectacled, balding 50-year-old who’s as dynamic as his city. The center-left politician, hugely popular with the liberal Rome populace, made Tiber Village one of his dozens of initiatives to bring Rome to life in the steaming summer.
He arranged for Battelli di Roma, which runs ferries along the river, to finance the project and has cleanup boats regularly plying the water, chasing away the rats. Tiber Village opened June 18 and closes Sept. 17. It already has attracted nearly 1,000 visitors a day.
My visit bordered on the surreal. On a gorgeous, 82-degree evening, I walked past Castel Sant’Angelo, Hadrian’s magnificent first-century fortress that guarded ancient Rome along the Tiber, and down the steep, stone steps. Suddenly, I was ankle deep in sand and rum.
I sat at the open-air bar and ordered a nice, cold Frascati Superiore for 4 euros ($4.80). Looking out over the river with modern lounge music drifting from amps nearby, the Tiber looked – dare I say – almost romantic. Looking behind me, the city that turned romance into an art form agreed. Couples, both young and old, cooed over a river where I once saw rats doing the breaststroke during a meal on one of the Tiber’s sad attempts at a floating restaurant.
I asked the bartender, a lifelong Venice resident named Francesco Zamborlan, about the rat problem.
“There were big rats here,” he said. “No more. They went into the city. That’s where the cats get them.”
I wanted a sample of the beach atmosphere, and the next day I went to the pool. I walked down the steps from Ponte Cavour, just outside the village, and I could still see plastic bottles, a broken umbrella and bits of plastic. But once I passed through the village’s welcoming arch (no price for admission), the Tiber seemed as clean as Lake Tahoe.
On the overcast day, only a dozen sunbathers surrounded the pool, with the spectacular basilica of St. Peter’s visible in the background. It’s $5 for the pool and $4 for just the beach, but Roberto Presciutti, manning the pool, said, “On Saturday and Sunday there were 50 people here. It was jammed.”
Tall and dark, Presciutti could have passed for a lifeguard in Santa Monica. He worked for the Italian Red Cross and volunteered in Thailand during the tsunami crisis in December.
Now a social worker, he said most of the employees along the pool and at the beach are former prisoners and drug users whom Veltroni wanted employed in a reform program.
I asked Presciutti, a lifelong resident of Rome, if he ever swam in the Tiber.
“Never,” he said without hesitation. “My mother did – 40 years ago.”
John Henderson can be reached at jhenderson@denverpost.com or 303-820-1299.
