Gualtieri says plan to open Tevere to public swimming is “absolutely within reach”.
Swimming in Rome’s river Tiber will be possible within five years, according to the city’s mayor Roberto Gualtieri, who reiterated plans announced earlier this summer.
Describing it as “an absolutely achievable goal”, Gualtieri on Wednesday said he has discussed the project directly with Italy’s environment minister Pichetto Fratin and Lazio governor Francesco Rocca.
The mayor was speaking at the Italian Pavilion at Expo 2025 Osaka, Japan, during an event titled The Eternal City Welcomes the Future: Attractiveness, Culture, Beauty, and Innovation.
“We have already established a working group that will soon be interinstitutional”, Gualtieri said, noting that the cost of the project is still being estimated.
Earlier this year Paris opened the river Seine to public swimming for the first time in a century, after investing €1.4 billion into a clean-up programme ahead of the 2024 Olympic swimming competitions.
The cost of making the Tevere suitable for bathing safely is expected to be lower than that of Paris, Gualtieri said, because the French capital “started with much higher pollution levels”.
In July the mayor said he hoped to achieve the goal by the end of his potential second term in office, in other words by 2031, saying the main interventions required relate to industrial plants on the Tiber and the Aniene, a tributary that flows into the larger river in the north of Rome.
On Wednesday the mayor said that some areas of the Tiber, on certain days, would actually “be suitable for swimming today” but stressed that “to ensure full bathing safety even in the downstream section of the Aniene, some interventions are necessary.”
A number of initiatives in this regard are already under way, according to Gualtieri, who said the metropolitan city police “are conducting a screening of all discharges into the Aniene, including those outside the Roma Capital area, which are among the main causes of the current lack of bathing safety”.
The mayor added that Rome has already identified “three or four necessary actions” and “with the full support of the scientific and technological community and the institutions, we will develop a timeline” for the project.
Bathing in the Tevere was common in Rome up to the 1960s when it was first prohibited due to pollution caused by industrialisation as well as the risk of diseases such as leptospirosis which is transmitted by rats.
An exception to the rule is made on New Year’s Day when a group of daredevil divers thrill crowds by jumping off Ponte Cavour into the river’s icy waters 18 metres below.
