‘It’s changing the city’s face’: Locals share stories on how overtourism impacts Rome’s culture

Tourism in Italy has not only recuperated since the COVID-19 lockdown days: visitors are coming back in droves at unprecedented levels, particularly in the Italian capital of Rome.

Last year, a record 35 million people flocked to the Eternal City. And, with the Catholic Church’s Jubilee coming up next year, things are only going to get more intense.

I first moved to Rome back in April 2021, in the midst of COVID-19, to pursue my PhD programme. Back then, the city felt like one of Italian director Federico Fellini’s film sets.

I recount visiting the much-beloved Trevi Fountain in broad daylight, which was so empty you could hear a pin drop.

It was inevitable that things would have changed in due course. Yet little did I expect that, three years later, the situation would become so intolerable that Rome’s local government would mull over charging visitors to see iconic landmarks.

As the city plans to start ticketing people to visit Trevi Fountain, residents are wondering if things have gone too far - and if tourism has become more a burden on, rather than bulwark of, the city’s life.

“Overtourism is a plague,” Anthony Majanlahti, a Rome-based professor and one of the leading experts in the city’s history, tells Euronews Travel.

“The proposal to charge a fee [€2] will make foot traffic in the area worse, not better. In fact, it’s just a shameless cash grab.”

“What about the actual city life that goes on in the piazza, the shops and bars there, the church of SS. Vincenzo ed Anastasio on the corner, the city’s oldest pharmacy quietly looking onto the square?” he ponders.

Trevi Fountain is not the only part of the city to have felt tarnished by the ‘reverse’ Midas touch of overtourism. Locals claim that the overcrowded streets are