ROME -- Rome’s new mayor, Virginia Raggi, visited one of Rome’s most run-down neighbourhoods, Tor Bella Monaca, to address the increasing problem of Rome’s dirtiness. With there being an estimated two rats for every inhabitant of the capital city, it has become clear that Raggi needs to crack down on the waste and rubbish that is polluting the streets of Rome.

 Ms Raggi, who in the early days of her role is concerned with proving her worth, has made an appeal to the citizens of the Eternal City to help clean up the streets and make Rome a cleaner and more pleasant place to live. A video has gone viral on social media which shows children playing with and counting rats in the Tor Bella Monaca area, one of Rome’s poorest regions on the far east side of the city. The children in the video are seen to be playing between apartment blocks where piles of rubbish lie on the ground and where numerous rats are running around at their feet.

 Having begun her initiative to make Rome a cleaner place in the Tor Bella Monaca neighbourhood, where she was accompanied on Monday by the Councillor for Environmental Sustainability, Paolo Muraro, Ms Raggi has promised to address the problem in as much of the city as she can. She has also threatened punishments for those in charge of the organisation ‘AMA’ which is concerned with the tidying up of Rome and has reportedly in past months failed to carry out its cleaning duties to a satisfactory level.

 Ms Raggi has asked citizens of the capital to make known the dirtier areas in need of attention by posting pictures on Twitter. She wants people to use the hashtag ‘#romapulita’ to go alongside their photo of a dirty or run-down street in order to draw attention to what needs to be done in order to make Rome a cleaner place. Raggi said “we will start from the outskirts, from forgotten Rome, to being to re-establish order and normality.”

 Having promised to the clean up the dirtiest areas of the city within only a few days, and though she acknowledges that this might be an ambitious task, Ms Raggi has set out to deal with the ‘emergency’ areas which are most in need of attention. She has also set out to tackle to problem of animal infestation in the city, following sightings of rats all over Rome, especially in the Castel Sant’Angelo area which is a key tourist attraction, as well as cockroaches which reportedly were found in buses in the Acilia area, and even wild boars which were photographed grazing in the rubbish on the Monte Mario hill.

 The mayor, after walking around the Tor Bella Monaca neighbourhood, said “it is unacceptable that our children are forced to live and play in such conditions; there are too many people here as well as in other neighbourhoods who are living in decay.” She has set out to crack down on sanctions and has said that those who dirty the city will face punishment.

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