An iron metro without stops going 40 metres below the historical centre of Rome costing 5 billion. Not even a think tank made up of Caligula, Nero and Heliogabalus could have done worse. What imperial madness didn’t achieve, Rutelli and Berlusconi did. God makes them and then He messes them up.

Interview with Antonio Tamburrino, expert on transport systems
Rutelli’s great refusal
”Good day to you. I am Professor Tamburrino and I deal with the issues of transport in Rome. Rome is a very special situation, because it is a city that has been in the same location for at least 3 thousand years and it was the first city in the history of civilisation in which the issues of traffic were resolved in a novel and scientific way when the Roman Empire constructed 300 thousand kilometres of connecting roads and logistics that was the first effective transport network in the history of humanity. It was so efficient that Rome with only a few more than 50 legions, managed to control practically the whole of the known world, by moving its troops in less than 5 days. For that time, it was a fantastic solution.
In Rome there has been a progression of innovation 2 thousand years ago that has been an example for the whole world. Now we are living the contrary experience. The worst situation for mobility in all the capitals of Europe. Up until now, we have two lines, a really reduced network when compared to all the other capitals. It is clear that a third line is fundamental. Sixteen years ago in 1994, there was a decision to construct one. The government put aside vast sums to equip the city in preparation for the Jubilee in the year 2000. The ad hoc committees created, with an agreement among others with the Vatican City and the Italian State decided that the priority should be the third metro line. There was a good start. But then a massive problem was created because at that time the Mayor of Rome was Rutelli who decided as soon as he became Mayor in 1993, to tackle the issue of transport by signing an “iron pact” with the then administrator of the State Railways who was Lorenzo Necci. When the government basically made all the money available for the new metro C, the project was developed by Necci and thus by railway personnel. That was the fundamental error that unfortunately we are still living with, because the engineers of the railway were thinking of a railway rather than a metro.
Thus they developed a project based on these requirements: a heavy metro on iron, a train, with very high capacity, 30 – 40 thousand passengers, but with these basic parameters they immediately had a conflict with the reality and they realised that to create such a colossal project in the historical centre of Rome, with its archaeological finds, the most important in the world, was impossible because it involved destroying all the roads, the monuments, the ancient buildings and thus the Mayor who had done so much talking around the world in New York, Paris, London about the modernisation of the city with this great project, withdrew the metro project and thus lost the State financing. For example by taking the more modern metros that run on rubber, completely without drivers that were already in existence in Lille from 1982, another similar model was constructed in Turin, thus everyone can see it, much more limited and less costly, was a proposal that the government put to Rutelli, but Rutelli dropped the idea and preferred to renounce the 100% State financing rather than go for a technology that was not Italian technology, that eliminated the big construction companies from the scene. Thus in 1995, the Mayor knowingly renounced the creation of the third metro line in Rome.

The first metro in the world without stops
Then the circumstances for taking the project came about in 2001, because the government , at that time there was the Berlusconi government, and it promulgated the “Objective Law” for important public works, and the C line was inserted in the list. The scope of the project was drastically resized. Instead of 30-40 thousand passengers they decided on just 24 thousand passengers and they decided that it was no longer possible to put off having integrated automation. In fact all the basic parameters still had the character of a metro that was similar to a train. Thus a mammoth metro that was extremely costly and with a great impact. This work was put out to tender. It has gone ahead in some way as regards the suburbs thus the easiest part, from the outskirts to the East of Rome up to San Giovanni, to the Mure Aureliane {The Aurelian Walls} and from the moment that the construction work was about to start in the centre of the city, thus where the most serious problems are, all the limits have become apparent. In fact, now we have the situation that there is no more money and if there were to be a continuation of this metro, it would go across the whole of the historical centre of the city, thus the centre where there is the greatest need to transport people on the metro and no longer using automobiles, but it would go across with no stops or stations: an absolute world record in history to have a metro with no stops. It will start a new era in the technology of urban transport! The bad projects, the bad entrepreneurial interests, the political short-sightedness have acted in such a way as to carry out a project that is absolutely “anti-historic”.

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