Seemingly each vacationer in Rome is aware of the important thing to returning to the Everlasting Metropolis is to toss a coin into the Trevi Fountain and make a want. The consequence: Hoards of tourists packing the Baroque monument any given day, taking selfies and betting on a return journey.
Officers at the moment are contemplating a plan to handle tourism to considered one of Rome’s most-visited websites: A two euro ($A3.37) ticket to entry an open-air fountain that has at all times been freed from cost.
The proposal by metropolis’s prime tourism official, Alessandro Onorato, comes after the Italian lagoon metropolis of Venice examined a controversial 5 euro daytripper entry charge to town this summer time. It have to be deliberated by the Metropolis Council earlier than it takes impact, however the metropolis’s mayor, Roberto Gualtieri, has already voiced help.
“Two euros is kind of the identical quantity that folks toss into the fountain to make a want,” Onorato instructed The Related Press.
Cities throughout the globe are grappling with the right way to handle the ever-growing variety of vacationers, who gas the financial system however can create inconveniences to residents by converging on the identical prime websites.
“We have now to keep away from, particularly in a fragile artwork metropolis like Rome, that too many vacationers injury the vacationer expertise, and injury town,” Onorato mentioned.
“We have to safeguard two issues, that vacationers do not expertise chaos and that residents can proceed to reside within the centre.”
Onorato mentioned he hopes to check the doorway charge, which might be managed by way of a reservation system and a QR code, in time for the 2025 Jubilee Holy Yr, and have the system operational by spring.
Passersby within the piazza overlooking the fountain is not going to must pay. The charge could be charged solely to these coming into the 9 stone steps main as much as the fountain’s edge. It will be free to Romans.
Onorato mentioned the system would additionally assist discourage folks from consuming on the steps overlooking the fountain and feeding pigeons or, worse, from re-enacting Anita Ekberg’s plunge into the fountain in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, a continuously repeated misdemeanour that carries a high-quality.
