Eye on Expo 2030, Rome Dreams of Reinvigoration
Other visitors to the abandoned sports complex on the outskirts of Rome may see only muddy puddles, graffiti-stained walls and loose cables blocking their view. Not Matteo Gatto.
Mr. Gatto, the technical director of Rome’s €10 billion bid, or about $10.9 billion, to host the Expo 2030 World’s Fair, envisions a large exhibition hall. In the vast surrounding fields, he sees a winding boulevard dotted with international pavilions and sunshades with solar panels. Everything, in his incantation, is connected to Rome by an extended train line that would take 30 million people out of the Colosseum.
“It’s going to be beautiful,” he said.
But as Italy prepares to give its final pitch to the 179 international ambassadors who will vote in November on which city will host the Expo, there are two major obstacles standing in the way of Rome’s fabulous and perhaps fabulous future.
The first is the competition. Italy’s Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni will be in France on Tuesday to plead Italy’s case. But so are South Korea’s President Yoon Suk Yeol, who is pushing for Busan, and Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is backing Riyadh in a campaign that, as the Italians see it, has in return government investment on nations. deposited. For support.
The second challenge, and perhaps the greatest obstacle to Rome’s grand plan, is one much closer to home: Rome itself.
Years of degradation, seemingly intractable mess, transportation and infrastructure problems, and a cynical shrug of the shoulders by many Romans about the prospect of transformation or the possibility of change are not exactly the subject of campaign brochures. But officials say a rare confluence of international and national funding, private investment and a mayor with a reputation for competence has put Rome at a crossroads between decline and revival.
The Expo, which helped Milan grow into a cosmopolitan and international city in 2015, could be decisive for Rome’s rise, according to Italian backers.
The city was in dire need of “a unifying project to put the city, Italy’s capital, on the right track,” acknowledged Giampiero Massolo, an Italian ambassador who heads Italy’s Expo campaign.
In the early 2000s, when Rome was led by ambitious and popular mayors, the city experienced a renaissance with major infrastructure and architectural projects, including the sports complex designed by Santiago Calatrava that Mr. Gatto would now like to give a new destination.
Called the Sail, for the high lattice roof that divided the sky into a blue grid, it was intended to host a world swimming championship. But it was abandoned in 2007 due to skyrocketing costs and misconduct allegations.
It was a harbinger of a city going downhill. The global financial crisis of 2008 exacerbated Rome’s problems. Hundreds of thousands of residents moved from the inner city to cheaper housing in the periphery. Extension of public services to sparsely populated areas became unsustainable. Waste collection and transportation agencies operating as ineffective patronage mills were of no help.
Nor did what many Romans consider successive incompetent administrations, including the previous, and much lamented, administration of Virginia Raggi, of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement. For many Romans, Mrs. Raggi’s name became synonymous with the degradation of the city. Garbage-strewn streets attracted wildlife. Buses didn’t show up or went up in flames. The grass in the parks swallowed up children.
Today, Ms. Raggi chairs the special committee for the Rome Expo bid, and recently led an awards ceremony at the headquarters, where children presented posters under a slide that read “Expo 2030: The Eternal City Faces the Future.”
They envisioned cars with solar panels, buses that worked, fountains with faucets to stop wasting water, and a “city better adapted to cleanliness”—in short, all the things Mrs. Raggi was accused of not doing.
“You were great,” said Mrs. Raggi, “A round of applause.”
Since she left office, a combination of factors has given the city its best chance in ages to turn things around. Billions of euros have poured into Rome from the European Union’s Pandemic Recovery Fund, national funding for the 2025 Holy Year celebration promises to brighten the city and, Expo officials said, will be used to restore the Sail. A relatively affordable capital has attracted foreign real estate investors.
“The city has bottomed out and is restarting, and all the numbers and data are clear about the growth,” said Rome’s mayor Roberto Gualtieri, a former finance minister. “The expo would be the icing on the cake. That would be a huge boost. But honestly, our strategy doesn’t just depend on Expo.”
The mayor said in an interview that the Romans would soon see real changes. A controversial €600 million waste-to-energy plant to solve the city’s horrific waste problem was “fully on track” to begin operation in 2026. Maintenance on Rome’s subway lines was due to be completed in about a year and a half, the first tramway in about 20 years was in the works, and the repaving of 800 kilometers or about 500 miles of main streets represented “the largest work in the city’s history “.
“On the roads, the subway, the train and the garbage, I know this will be resolved by 2026,” he said. “I can bet on that.”
He spoke of new museums, high-tech industries and an injection of youth and new infrastructure not seen since the early 2000s.
But despite the mayor’s optimism, the city is still in an insanely poverty-stricken state and needs all the help it can get.
Last month, Italy pulled out all the stops when the international Expo representatives came to Rome. Delegates took part in an evening music performance in front of the Colosseum that included a ballet dancer hanging from a balloon in the shape of the moon and a light show on the walls of the arena. Five hundred drones moved in synchronized choreography and flew overhead to put an inclusive spin on Rome’s 2,500-year history.
But Italians, as history has also shown, know when politics needs a dagger. In an Expo election free of geopolitical and financial hassles, the Italians have suggested that the Saudi bid was aimed more at turning Riyadh into a global metropolis than promoting a global regeneration.
Mr Massolo pointed out that the financial power of the Gulf states, such as Qatar in its successful bid to host the World Cup, has led to some remorse, albeit more for the buyer than for the buyer. Yet Saudi Arabia, legitimate in its use of financial leverage, he said, had proved a formidable competitor because of “the power, of course, of money, the power of investment.”
For example, France threw its support for Riyadh during the energy crisis, when President Emmanuel Macron started looking for alternatives to Russian gas. During Prince Mohammed’s visit, the Expo was an important item on the agenda.
“Of course we would be happier with France’s support,” said Mr Massolo. “But apparently Macron, as you know, has his interest in making other decisions.”
In contrast to “the massive public investment of the Saudis and the huge private mega-corporations of Korea,” Massolo said, Italy had a different pitch.
It was trying to show voters “what is achievable when we work together,” he said. But even that cuddly-sounding theme had an edge, as Italian Expo boosters portrayed the Saudi bid as a human rights disaster waiting to happen.
At a recent gay pride event at the Baths of Caracalla, Mr Gualtieri warned that a Saudi victory portends a “stark, oppressive and dark” Expo.
As the Expo delegates toured a food market in Rome near the Circus Maximus, where they accepted strawberries and cheese from vendors, they also heard from gay rights activists who had been invited by the city to highlight the contrast between Rome and Riyadh.
“If you think about our competitors,” said Mr. Gatto, the expo’s technical director, in the sports complex’s more modern ruin, where a dark reflective puddle of dirty rainwater took the place of an Olympic-sized swimming pool, “it’s a clash of civilizations.”