ROME — After five months of works, Piazza Venezia still looks like a construction site despite its iconic location at the heart of the capital’s most visited area. 

 The operations began on March 23 with the intention of refurbishing the square’s most uneven segments of road. Initially, former Mayor Ignazio Marino tried to get the entire square restyled but had to settle on fixing only the square’s most damaged sections after he was refused government funding. 

 Despite the reduced scale of the plan, the works are still very visibly in progress on the corner between the square and the via Cesare Battisti, with workers absent on a regular basis. Metal barriers erected around the site barely manage to contain the flow of tourists making their way from the Imperial Fora to the via del Corso, and the square is still a veritable obstacle course, with bumps and gutters making progress difficult particularly in front of the Vittoriano palace. 

 “Ideally, we would stop tourist buses from being able to operate in the historic centre, particularly in Piazza Venezia and other cobblestoned areas, instead of letting numbers grow every year as they have been recently,” said Nathalie Naim, head of the Radical movement of Rome’s Municipio I.

 “There isn’t any point in refurbishing the pavements if these heavy vehicles will only create more damage," Naim continued.

 “And despite all this, we’ve managed to get rid of electric minibuses, which suited the centre’s delicate road network perfectly and were always full of tourists.”

lej