24 gennaio 2000

Rome Journal; Cleaning Up a Capital and Noticing the Homeless

Termini, Rome's long-neglected central train station, now gleams like a temple of traveler comfort and consumer delights. After a 14-month renovation, there are polished floors, posh cafes, computerized ticket sales and even a glossy, well-lit underground shopping mall, patrolled by the police and private security guards who politely but firmly expel vagrants.

Only the huddled bodies lying on the dark surrounding sidewalks suggest the social upheaval beneath this capital's effort to renovate and modernize itself for the year 2000. Train stations and public parks that were once used by vagrants, immigrants, drug addicts and alcoholics have been cleaned up and closed off.

Eight homeless people have died on the streets of Rome since New Year's Eve, the start of the Vatican's 2000 Jubilee, including a 60-year old woman who died near St. Peter's Basilica. Those deaths have caused shock and soul-searching in a usually balmy capital where homelessness mostly used to seem like a preoccupation of larger, harsher cities like New York or Moscow.

''I understand that now that Termini is fixed up, the city cannot allow the homeless to sleep there,'' said Francesca Zuccari, a director of the Community of Sant'Egidio, a Catholic charitable institution. ''It's a question of public order.''

She spoke late Tuesday night as she and a dozen volunteers handed out sandwiches to hundreds of Kurdish immigrants lined up outside the train station and tried to reassure a group of panicked elderly Italian vagrants who had just been ordered to leave the station.

''But there is also the question of our own decency as a civilization,'' she said. ''Where are these people supposed to go?''

By the standards of New York -- where on any given night, 25,000 people bed down in shelters and thousands more roam the streets, a rate three times higher than in Rome -- the homeless in the Italian capital are almost undetectable.

City officials and charitable groups estimate that there are as many as 6,000 homeless people in Rome, and that on any given night, 1,800 sleep on the street. Even after the city hurriedly added 200 additional cots in abandoned warehouses to cope with a cold-weather emergency last week, there are only 1,030 shelter beds. That is far fewer than needed, even by the most conservative estimates.

Even Rome's milder winters can kill people on the streets. Autopsy reports in the eight recent deaths have not been completed, and the victims range from a 60-year-old Swiss alcoholic whose name is known only as Heidi, who died on Jan. 3 a few blocks from St. Peter's, to a 51-year-old Italian man who died underneath his cardboard boxes on the Piazza Augusto Imperatore.

''The exact causes of death haven't been determined,'' said Giuseppina Gabriele, the city supervisor of services to the homeless. ''But we cannot deny that being on the street played a part.''

Italy, with its tradition of tight family ties and Catholic charity, was long spared the homeless phenomenon that became acute in the United States and some parts of Northern Europe in the 1980's. But recent budget cuts have left holes in Italy's relatively generous welfare safety net, family solidarity has splintered, and immigrants who pour in from the Balkans, North Africa and elsewhere, lured by a mild climate and a relatively easygoing police force, have put new strains on a once fairly homogenous society.

Until recently, the city of Rome spent relatively little of its own money on the homeless, whose numbers have doubled in the last two years. City officials who work with the homeless contend that more than half of those in their care are either from other regions of Italy or foreigners.

Ninety percent of funds allocated to charities like the Salvation Army, Sant'Egidio and Caritas, the Catholic aid agency, for meals and shelters have been provided by the regional government, and charities also rely on church and state funds and private donations to make ends meet.

But last year, without explanation, the region cut funds for homeless projects from $3.5 million to $3.3 million. The city made up the difference and earmarked an additional $3.8 million to open special housing centers that would provide daytime care as well as beds, and would try to find jobs and real housing for the residents.

''It is not a solution to keep people on the street,'' Ms. Gabriele said. ''We must aim to get them back into society.''

But those longer-term efforts are costly and limited in scope. This year the city will be able to accommodate 130 people in such programs.

Rome does not have the same grinding social debate over homelessness that so divides New Yorkers. It has not been much of a problem until recently, and a European social welfare tradition leads most people to say there should be help for the homeless.

Some Italian homeless people speak resentfully of the immigrants they view as getting handouts from the government that should be reserved for needy Italians, but no political party is pressing to require the homeless to work for their food and shelter, or deny it to illegal aliens.

''Squeegee men,'' mostly Sri Lankans, Pakistanis and Africans, are usually tolerated by the police and taxpayers, as are beggars and gypsies.

Rome's mayor, Francesco Rutelli, a congenial center-left politician with matinee-idol looks, is not as given to expressing strong opinions on social issues as Mayor Rudolph Giuliani. Mayor Rutelli is under frequent attack, but the hot issues are traffic and unfinished construction sites, not the homeless.

But after the eight deaths and resulting banner newspaper headlines, the Italian government announced last week that it would divide $16 million among nine major Italian cities to deal with this winter's emergency. It was a signal that the existing systems cannot cope with a new urban reality.

Even now, the phenomenon of homelessness here is new enough that Italians do not have their own word for today's style of vagrant. ''Barbone,'' a word coined in the 1930's for a man with a long beard, does not adapt easily to the new mix of alcoholics, drug addicts, immigrants, mentally ill people and the unemployed.

Newspapers use the English word, ''homeless'' or even the French term for wino, ''clochard.'' Government documents use the unwieldly term, ''people without a fixed abode.''

Sant'Egidio publishes a yearly Rome guide that lists where the homeless can get free meals or a bed, shower or wash their clothes.

At a canteen run by Caritas, which like Sant'Egidio has a contract from the city to provide food and shelter for the homeless, several hundred people line up daily for a free meal of pasta, potatoes and cutlets spooned out by elderly volunteers.

There are unemployed Italians who line up as well as pensioners. The Italians sit at different tables from the foreigners -- middle-aged Ukrainian women, Albanians, Kurds and Africans, some of whom appear as if shell-shocked by their downward spiral in a city they hoped was paved with opportunity.

''I didn't expect Europe to be like this -- I thought I could continue my education,'' Biniam Tesfai, 19, said, smiling wryly at his own naivete.

Mr. Tesfai, an Ethiopian university student who fled his war-ravaged country seven months ago, eats at the canteen and at night sleeps in a makeshift shelter, 40 men to a room, that is run privately by an elderly nun outside the city limits.

''It is difficult to find work when you see so many Italians unemployed,'' he said, adding that he hoped to go to another country soon. ''I do not want to stay here and do nothing. If that happens, sometimes you get crazy or do things you wouldn't normally do.''

ALESSANDRA STANLEY