What Does Rome's Citywide Presence of Visitors Seeking "Everyday Reality" Say About Overtourism?

What do you get when you cross a large, thriving city and a constant city-wide tourism campaign? Rome might be something close to the answer. The attraction of the city needs no highlighting: its illustrious history as the capital of a sophisticated ancient empire, the headquarters of the global Church, and a cradle of art from the Renaissance to the modern-day gives enough reasons for enough people for it to consistently be ranked among one of the most visited cities in the world. Rome needs no marketing: opening a book on Western history is sufficient to motivate someone to visit.

And the city has continued to lure tourists not just because of its past. The grand classical buildings are certainly there, but they are not living museums. Amidst the city's picturesque wide boulevards are omnipresent signs that the city is no museum of historical exhibits. Green-filled parks have functioning fountains and armies of kids. Cafes and restaurants are heaving with locals enjoying espresso, pasta, and gelato. Tourists need not chart their own path in the city: simply do what the Romans do and they will have a good time beyond just seeing the sights.

That combination of history and the present is what, in my opinion, makes tourism in Rome quite different from many other places that I've been. Every major tourist city has its headline-grabbing highlights. Rome is no different: Pantheon, Trevi Fountain, Spanish Steps, and the Colosseum are all crawling with visitors for a good reason. But tourists do not shuttle from one sight to another. They walk through its backstreets, admiring nondescript buildings over lunch, drinks, and dessert, making the whole city center one gigantic tourist spot without a let up from the crowds.

Thus, walking anywhere in the city is a constant battle with the effect of what some may call overtourism. Restaurants and souvenir shops catering to foreign visitors push out shops for locals, leading the local residents to then flee for the quiet, convenience, and peace of the suburbs. The city may still have its residents, but their interests are visibly subsumed by the pivotal need to convenience the tourist crowd, in the process, maximizing the positive economic impact that their presence can bring to a city that evolves to depend more on them financially.

That pervasive effect of overtourism should be a lesson for all cities seeking Rome's success in drawing in tourist money. More than anywhere else, the city has been able to democratize tourism by ensuring that its benefits go beyond hotel bookings and ticket sales. Neighborhoods beyond the major tourist nodes can also financially benefit. But scratch below the surface, and the benefit is much less democratic than they first appear. A more geographically spread out tourism boom just mean more local residents being displaced to areas where no tourists would venture as a large swath of city center becomes too expensive.

Any locale seeking to make money off providing some sort of "authentic" travel experience without the tourist gimmicks should recognize the clear limits and harm of the approach. As tourists walk Rome's streets to experience how Romans live their everyday lives, they inadvertently shape Roman lives for the worse among those not directly profitting from the tourist presence. Only those who love seeing foreigners creep into daily commutes, supermarket runs, and commute to offices would welcome being a constant exhibit for tourists to measure what is authentic and what is not.

Ultimately, catering to tourists and residents is a fundamental paradox. Tourists, even when seeking to enjoy the "everyday" of locals in their destinations, look for those elements of the everyday that they do not experience back home. That staged "everyday" is often too tangential to the actual experience of the residents, whose lives are just too mundane to even the most boredom-tolerant visitors. Accentuating the not so ordinary within the ordinary would necessitate disrupting residents' lives. Their morning sandwiches, bus rides, and hospital visits all become unavailable, too expensive, or too time-consuming.

As global travel rebounds from the nadir of COVID, perhaps it is a time to revisit the need to set strict boundaries and distances between tourist spots and visitors on one hand, and locals, with their homes, offices, and cheap eateries, on the other. Mixing the two sound like an ideal win-win for both, but without crowd control, the long-term result is sanitized "everyday lives" performed by professional service staff as real locals simply disappear from where the tourists are. For Rome, at least, that shakeup will share cut down on what makes the place popular to begin with.