Rome’s new mayor tackles his predecessors’ mess

FOR A MANPD with the least enviable job in Italian politics, Roberto Gualtieri looks surprisingly cheerful. By last October, when he became mayor of Rome, the city had been visibly deteriorating for years, accumulating such a vast range of problems that its decline seemed irreversible. Wild boar rummaged in mounds of uncollected rubbish and potholes scarred many streets. The city’s highest-profile infrastructure project, the construction of a third underground line, was not even close to finished after 14 years, despite having overrun its budget by €714m ($793m).Mr Gualtieri’s previous appointment was in Italy’s last government, a coalition between the maverick Five Star Movement and the centre-left Democratic Party () to which he belongs. As finance minister, he had to cope with the grim economic consequences of the pandemic. But governing Rome, he says, is perhaps even more taxing: “The job is broader. You have [to operate in] many different fields.”