Vacationers admire the Trevi Fountain in Rome, June 7, 2017. (AP Photograph/File)
ROME – Seemingly each vacationer in Rome is aware of the important thing to returning to the Everlasting Metropolis is to toss a coin into the Trevi Fountain and make a want.
The consequence: Hoards of holiday makers packing the Baroque monument any given day, taking selfies and betting on a return journey.
Officers are actually contemplating a plan to handle tourism to one among Rome’s most-visited websites: A 2-euro ($2.25) ticket to entry an open-air fountain that has at all times been freed from cost.
The proposal by metropolis’s prime tourism official, Alessandro Onorato, comes after the Italian lagoon metropolis of Venice examined a controversial 5-euro daytripper entry charge to the town this summer season. It have to be deliberated by the Metropolis Council earlier than it takes impact, however the metropolis’s mayor, Roberto Gualtieri, has already voiced help.
“Two euros is kind of the identical quantity that folks toss into the fountain to make a want,’’ Onorato informed The Related Press Friday.
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Cities throughout the globe are grappling with methods to handle the ever-growing variety of vacationers, who gasoline the economic system however can create inconveniences to residents by converging on the identical prime websites.
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“We have now to keep away from, particularly in a fragile artwork metropolis like Rome, that too many vacationers harm the vacationer expertise, and harm the town,’’ Onorato stated. “We have to safeguard two issues, that vacationers don’t expertise chaos and that residents can proceed to stay within the heart.”
Onorato stated he hopes to check the doorway charge, which might be managed by means of a reservation system and a QR code, in time for the 2025 Jubilee Holy 12 months, and have the system operational by spring.
Passersby within the piazza overlooking the fountain is not going to should pay. The charge can be charged solely to these getting into the 9 stone steps main as much as the fountain’s edge. It might be free to Romans.
Onorato stated the system would additionally assist discourage individuals from consuming on the steps overlooking the fountain and feeding pigeons or, worse, from reenacting Anita Ekberg’s plunge into the fountain in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita,” a often repeated offense that carries a tremendous.
“It might occur much less, or possibly it wouldn’t occur in any respect, as a result of whoever would enter, we’d know their names and the place they stay. It turns into extra difficult,’’ he stated.