When Jason, a 28-year-old from the UK, landed in Rome last year, he was excited. As a player of the video game Age of Empires II, which had released the “Return of Rome” expansion that May, he was particularly interested in experiencing the city’s history and ancient monuments in the flesh—and not just the ones everyone already knows. “More people talk about the fall of Rome than the buildup of it,” he says. “[And] the Roman empire’s a cool point of history that was split up into Byzantine, Goths, all of these sections, after it fell.”
During his trip, he saw the Colosseum, went to the Vatican, stopped into shops, and ate what he was told was authentic, Roman food. “It was one of the bucket list things, you know?” he says of the trip.
He’ll never go back again. “I’m still traumatized by it.”
Rome, already in the midst of an overtourism crisis, reached an all-time high of 35 million overnight stays last year. During this peak in popularity, an Instagram Reel boosted by a viral tweet unearthed men’s supposed obsession with the Roman Empire, quickly making Rome not just a tourist hot-spot but something of an internet cultural touchstone. “How often do I think about it?” one man says in a viral 2023 TikTok in response to the trend. “A few times a week, I’d say?” This “men thinking about the Roman Empire” trend kicked off a renewed wave of enthusiasm for the city, but some men arrived only to find its legacy tarnished.
“I’d consider myself a history buff and was very interested in taking in the Roman artifacts,” says Mykolas, who visited the city earlier this month. Immediately, however, the 26-year-old says he was met with a notable amount of trash and heavily congested traffic, which is an experience Jason echoes: “It was falling to pieces, rubbish everywhere.”
Some of this isn’t new. Rome has been battling a trash problem since at least 1752, when an inscription on a wall by Piazza Farnese warned of no disposal “in this site and place, garbage of any kind, or of creating a garbage dump, under penalty of 25 scudi for every offense.” The message remains to this day, and yet, the trash persists too. In fact, a dispute over building a new incinerator for the trash plaguing the city was an inciting incident for the government’s July 2022 rebellion, according to the New York Times.
Jason travels regularly, which is how he realized Rome was on another level. He knew to expect a certain level of crowds, but “the city was in pretty bad disarray in comparison to, for example, Budapest,” he says. “Rome, which receives a lot more tourist money, was falling to pieces.”
But that’s just the tip of the trash fire. While Jason didn’t like the garbage, it was Rome’s entire tourism ecosystem that really rubbed him the wrong way. “I know you get this in big cities where people come up to you and ask you to buy things, but I’ve never seen it as pushy as that,” he says. “I had literally someone chasing us down the street.”
In Rome’s case, as with many other European cities, tourism begets tourism. As the number of tourists has increased over the last few years, businesses, restaurants, and others looking to benefit from the money these visitors bring in, cropped up. When Jason visited the Vatican, for instance, he saw people offering fast-passes to beat the line and selling t-shirts of “the Pope dabbing” outside of what should have been, he feels, a respected religious site. “When Jesus went to a church and he saw people selling stuff outside and inside it, it was the one time in the Bible where he completely lost it,” he says.
The list goes on. With local establishments forced to compete for tourist dollars for instance, authentic food options are difficult for many visitors to find. It’s not enough to go off the beaten path in search of hidden gems, you have to go off off, which at a certain point begs the question, “Why are we in Rome at all?”
“When Jesus went to a church and he saw people selling stuff outside and inside it, it was the one time in the Bible where he completely lost it.”
Most tourists visit Rome for the historic monuments, and yet, some visitors say, the overcrowding made them near-impossible to navigate. And in Jason’s opinion, they aren’t in the best condition, either. “You’ve got something like that, you’ve gotta look after it,” he says.
Rome is trying. Earlier in September, Mayor Roberto Gualtieri publicly considered possible measures to curb tourism, including limiting or charging non-Romans for access to the Trevi Fountain, saying the situation at the highly popular landmark has become “very difficult to manage.” Rome has already imposed fines for bad behavior on the site since 2017, but that hasn’t entirely proven successful; in 2018, an eight-person brawl broke out among tourists scrambling for the best selfie.
Meanwhile, locals are just trying to get by in a city they say can treat them like an afterthought to its visitors. “Rome is already a very populous city and both the car and foot traffic are critical even if you only count the locals,” Gabriel Meta, a 21-year-old who has lived in the city of Rome intermittently over the past ten years, says. “This means that in the summertime students and workers who rely on public transport to move have a really hard time.”
The transportation is limited, the streets crowded, the trash piling up on the sidewalks—and an additional 30 million tourists are expected next year. No, not because of Emily In Paris. It’s the 2025 jubilee, a year-long Roman Catholic event that happens every 25 years.
Meta doesn’t blame the tourists, but rather the “extremely inefficient administration.” In addition to transportation improvements, he thinks the city should be directing people to the art and history throughout the entire territory, instead of “focusing on the same nine to ten monuments in the center and creating an extreme concentration of people in a relatively small area.”
There are other ideas, too. A proposal put forward by the Cgil, Cisl, and Uil unions this month suggested increasing the price of transportation tickets to €2.50—just for tourists (the current cost is €1.50). This could, they say, cover some if not all of the 22 million euros needed for the 2025-2027 period. It could also, presumably, curb the number of tourists.
By the end of the trip, Mykolas says he had still overall enjoyed Rome, mostly because he had braced himself for the reality. “I was expecting a major international city with lots of traffic and tourism, and that’s what it was,” he says. It required some navigating to avoid tourist hot-spots, but it was worth it. Jason, however, is ready to leave Rome to the history books.
“I still find it really interesting,” he says of ancient Rome. “But today it feels like the fallen empire.”
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