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Rome hopes to welcome swimmers back to the River Tiber within five years, the city’s mayor has announced, drawing inspiration from Paris, where the Seine was reopened for public bathing this summer for the first time in a century.
During a visit on Thursday to the Osaka Expo in Japan, Roberto Gualtieri said a working group had been set up to study the feasibility of the clean-up project.
“We are pleased to have already established that this is an entirely achievable goal: within five years, we will be able to swim in the Tiber,” Gualtieri said.
But the Italian media and experts reacted with scepticism, suggesting it could take rather longer to reduce current pollution to an acceptable level, particularly in a country where public works can have notoriously lengthy timescales.
Until the 1960s, Romans regularly swam in the river, but pollution prompted the authorities to introduce restrictions. Today, swimming is strictly prohibited, with fines running into the hundreds of euros, though a longstanding New Year’s Day tradition survives in which divers plunge from one of Rome’s bridges into the chilly waters below.
Gualtieri has said that because pollution rates in the Tiber are lower than those previously recorded in the Seine, the Roman operation, if it went ahead, would be cheaper than its €1.4bn (£1.2bn) Parisian precursor.
Yet, the Italian capital’s river is far from pristine. In April, scientists from the Tara Microplastics mission published findings on European waterway pollution that showed the Tiber had an average of three microplastic particles per cubic metre. That may be well below the more than 20 particles per cubic metre recorded in India’s Ganges, but it is still far from reassuring.
Further research in September 2024 by Italy’s Institute for Environmental Protection and Research (ISPRA) revealed that the Tiber carried more floating waste – mostly plastic – into the sea than any other Italian river, alongside worrying concentrations of ammonia and faecal bacteria.
“The health risks linked to pollution in the Tiber and in inland waters are extremely high,” Alessandro Miani, the president of the Italian Society of Environmental Medicine, told the news website Roma Today. “The presence of faecal bacteria such as Escherichia coli can trigger gastrointestinal infections in humans, with symptoms including diarrhoea and vomiting. Contact with contaminated water can also cause skin and eye infections, leading to rashes and eye irritation.”
The Paris project, meanwhile, was decades in the making. Although the Seine was used for swimming events during the 2024 Olympics, concerns over water quality persisted. Several events were postponed because of high E coli levels, while some athletes took precautionary medication before competing.
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All in all, the Italian media has been unconvinced about the Tiber’s mooted renaissance. “The road to making the Tiber swimmable in five years is anything but downhill. For now, it remains a distant goal,” wrote Roma Today.
In late July, when Gualtieri first raised the prospect of making the river swimmable, the national daily La Repubblica ran with the headline: “A swimmable Tiber? A long and costly journey – if it ever begins.”
The paper pointed to a far smaller project – making the lake in Rome’s EUR district fit for bathing – that carries a price tag of about €8m and a timeline of at least five years. “The Tiber will take far longer,” La Repubblica concluded.
Reuters contributed to this report.
