Three million people live in the Eternal City and we rarely agree on anything. However, if there is one word that manages the unique feat of sparking the same emotion in all denizens of Rome, it’s “giubileo.”
2025 is the year of the Jubilee, also known in the Catholic Church as a Holy Year; every 25 years pilgrims from all over the world are encouraged to visit the seven papal basilicas in Rome to receive pardon for all sins. For their part, tourists will be blessed to walk through renovated streets, freshly painted buildings, and maintained monuments when they visit Rome in 2025. But not all that glitters is gold. Not to everyone, at least.
This Jubilee seems to be designed to test the patience of Romans. We expect 35 million pilgrims, and everything in the Eternal City has seemingly revolved around this fact… if only for the past year. As it befits a city that is expecting such an event, monuments needed to be maintained and cleaned, street pavement fixed, and very road circulation changed to favor pilgrim routes. All to the inconvenience of locals. About 400 construction sites were opened in 2024, and roughly half of them were completed by December 24, the official start of the Jubilee. Some sites will not even be finished by the end of this Jubilee, estimating an end date for 2027, which is halfway through to the next Jubilee. In fact, in 2033, we shall have a “special edition” in celebration of the 2000th anniversary of the death and resurrection of Christ. We have that to look forward to, but hopefully, less titanic reconstruction will be needed in 8 short years. The construction of a metro station and underground museum in the iconic Piazza Venezia are expected to last a full decade.
What is hard to grasp is why most of the constructions only started in 2024, when this event has been in the plans for about seven centuries. Yes, that’s right. It’s been known since 1470 that the Pope would order a Jubilee in 2025. The answer is mostly to be found in political reasons: nobody wanted to take responsibility for these money-squandering plans during election times, at the national, regional, and city levels. Apart from the logistical hell they caused, the amount of public funds spent on bettering Rome for the Jubilee amounts to 4.8 billion euros, according to info reported by Italian magazine L’Espresso. Not exactly great for campaigning.
We did not ask for this, nor did our elected officials, who just had to go along with it and did their best to prepare the city. So much ado about nothing or, rather, something nobody seems to want. As it were, the tradition of calling a Jubilee belongs entirely to the Pope, and it started in 1300, back when there was no Italy, no government, and no local administration outside of the papacy here in Rome. It is an understatement to say that times and circumstances have changed. So why shouldn’t the Vatican take ownership of this titanic undertaking and shoulder more economic and logistic responsibility, other than providing hot meals for a few thousand pilgrims staying nearby?
As far as tourists are concerned, Vatican City is, for all intents and purposes, not its own country, with its own laws and treasury, but a tiny neighborhood in Rome, Italy. One of the many to visit, one so small that nobody can lodge there, is just an important step in a varied itinerary that includes many parts of Rome. At the heart of this year’s pilgrimage, the area surrounding the Vatican has undergone significant renovations to prepare for the pilgrim route to St. Peter’s Basilica. On Christmas Eve, 2024, Pope Francis opened the Holy Door, the first time a pope has done so in 24 years.
While it harkened to the official start of Jubilee, it also meant that pilgrims could no longer enter the basilica from just any part of Piazza di San Pietro. One entrance means slimmer paths to the Holy Door and longer lines that zigzag to Piazza Pia and its views of Castel Sant’Angelo over the Tiber River. More crowds and fewer places to put them led to an unexpected silver lining: the transformation of Piazza Pia from busy car lanes to a fresh-paved, car-free piazza that welcomes safe pedestrian traversing.
Through all of this, the administration of Rome has to take the brunt of the challenge and rise to the occasion. And the people of Rome - not of Vatican City - have had to live in purgatory for it in 2024. And when the city will be bursting at the seams with over-tourism for all of 2025, it will be pure hell.
Romans are accustomed to making do with chaos, and we certainly are no strangers to tourists. We are more than used to dreadful traffic, the occasional pothole, public lights not functioning at night, and the average crime rate of a big metropolis. We’re just not used to chaos being systematic. Picture thousands more tourist buses roaming the tiny streets of the city center, trash everywhere, B&B locks ruining the facades of centuries-old buildings, and noise in all holy and profane places.
Don’t forget the economic consequences of the real estate market exploding, and prices skyrocketing for everything from food to transportation. And with the ongoing construction sites that have taken over the city, blocking and altering dozens of streets, traffic has become ontological, a perennial state of being, rather than a possibility, making it impossible for anyone to get anywhere on time.
These are just some hints of collateral damage we are facing at the moment and will be facing all year. It goes unsaid that 35 million pilgrims are positive for the economy, but they can also be rather disruptive for the lives of locals, drying out resources and negatively impacting housing, pollution, transportation, and healthcare.
The Mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, has certainly worked to prepare Rome for the Jubilee in myriads of ways, but will it be enough to sustain Romans and all visitors? Rome’s fragile transportation system has been strengthened by replacing all city buses with state-of-the-art hybrid and electric buses. The left-wing city administration also financed thousands of new trash cans all over Rome to try and limit the damage.
However, tourists hardly care to toss plastic bottles into any bin, let alone sort their waste (recycling is mandatory in Italy, but no one fines tourists for not cleaning up after themselves). Similarly, public hospitals are free, but the right-wing national government keeps cutting funds from healthcare, and the system may very well collapse, with ERs constantly being packed and understaffed. It’s also impossible for locals and students to find housing, as the vast majority of landlords decided to turn their apartments into B&Bs with the juicy prospect of the Jubilee.
The hospitality industry is certainly thriving, and thousands of new jobs have been created to meet the high demand, but what will happen when the Jubilee ends? Will these people go back to unemployment, once the curve goes down? And other than hospitality workers and landlords, who else is truly benefitting from this wave of tourists more than they are hurting?
Sure, much renovation work in Rome would have been done at some point; old monuments needed maintenance anyway, and we just got them out of the way now. Jubilees have always called for renovations in Rome and always will. Once, famously, we got the Sistine Chapel out of it. The issue in 2024 was how everything was rushed and done simultaneously, creating no escape for locals.
What was initially conceived in 1300 as a year of indulgence turned into an over-tourism nightmare in 2025. Do not get me wrong: we are happy to welcome tourists and pilgrims and to share the beauty of our city.
We just ask for respect and understanding; the Eternal City is not a playground, but home to 3 million people, and our landmarks are heritage to all humanity: we all need to take care of it collectively.
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