Tourists and tramps trash churches

TOURISTS and vagrants have been accused of despoiling some of Italy’s most beautiful churches.

Visitors can no longer use the splendid entrance at Rome’s Basilica of St Mary Major, which is sealed off because it had become a meeting place for drunks and lovers.

In Florence, Catholic officials complain that church steps are being used as toilets at night and police in Venice plan to fine tourists for leaving lunch leftovers in the square outside St Mark’s Basilica.

Italy’s churches draw millions of visitors each year and anger is mounting over how some mistreat the nation’s religious heritage. Monsignor Timothy Verdon, on the staff at Florence’s Duomo, or cathedral, held a news conference this week to denounce the lack of respect shown to that magnificent church. “The millions of Italians and foreigners who come every year to admire the architecture and art, and many of them also to pray, must run through a kind of obstacle course.”

He hit out at the dozens of souvenir stalls outside the cathedral’s exit and the messy rubbish bins in the piazza “which are already spilling over by midday”.

Even worse, Verdon added, officials at several churches in Florence, a city renowned for grace and beauty, complained that the areas around their churches had been transformed into “open toilets”.

“It’s not the Florence you used to see, the drawing room of Europe,” lamented Mgr Angelo Livi, pastor at San Lorenzo church, the burial place of members of the princely Medici family and one of the churches cited in the cathedral’s appeal for help. “There’s always more and more bums and tourists sleeping outside,” Livi said. “The tourists sit on the steps and leave all the crumbs.”

Buying a sandwich in a grocery store for lunch on a church’s cool marble steps is a popular alternative to Italy’s pricey trattorias and cafes.

Responding to the appeal for city authorities to clean up the mess around churches, Mayor Leonardo Domenici said yesterday that Florence was no worse off than anywhere else in Italy.

Rome used to “put a policeman there every now and then, but it’s no good”, Necciari added.

“This is a Roman problem and think how many policemen you would need to guard all the monuments in Rome.”