Rome, are Briatore's flowers less decorous than the Trevi Fountain walkway?

A couple of weeks ago, the Municipality of Rome sanctioned Flavio Briatore’s Crazy Pizza restaurant with a 212-euro fine for violation of the regulations on outdoor arrangements: the flowers decorating the restaurant’s facade were not in line with the municipal regulation on decorum, which, according to Corriere della Sera, prohibits the installation of floral arrangements on the facades of historic buildings.

We do not contest the sanction to the kitschy composition: indeed, it is not exactly the best to see when walking down Via Veneto, where the restaurant is located. However, we can issue a provocation: for the City of Rome, is the walkway that will be installed to walk over the waters of the Trevi Fountain more decent? Isn’t the unwatchable contraption, already mounted ten years ago (and we hoped never to see it again) and dusted off this year to turn a restoration into a tourist show again, a punch in the face to that good taste that is invoked when one rails against Briatore’s flowers? Is that obnoxious, ridiculous steel and Plexiglas barrier, which divides the fountain from the square, altering the perception of the monument, really better than the Crazy Pizza flowers?

And most importantly: is it decent to provide the contingency for a public monument, for a fountain that was not meant to be a tourist attraction? Given the total lack of taste of the footbridge installed on the Trevi Fountain, how are we to imagine the square when closed-numbered entry to the monument is introduced, as envisaged a few days ago by the Rome City Council’s tourism councillor? How will one of Rome’s most beautiful squares be aggrandized?

With the hope that, once the construction site is dismantled, the Municipality of Rome will not reserve other unpleasant and unelegant surprises when a structure will be needed to control access to the monument and to check the time of stay (as announced by the alderman, one will not be able to stay in the fountain’s basin for more than thirty minutes), we can certainly draw one conclusion: right now, better the flowers of Crazy Pizza than the Trevi Fountain’s walkway.

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