The tiny Italian city will be a dock for huge cruise ships

On a cloudy day in January, Isola Sacra, a Hamlet in Fiumicino, 20 miles from Rome, does not look like a place that attracts masses of tourists. Low family houses with small gardens alternate with meadows and fields and life has the calming pace of a provincial city.

An old lighthouse is now in ruins and it is not far away Darsena dei bilancioniThe beach that has its name from the stilt houses, or bilancioniused for fishing.

But this coastal place at the mouth of the Tiber River is at the center of a controversy that threatens its future calm. It is the intended location of a new port called Fiumicino Waterfront, a joint venture between the cruise company Royal Caribbean and the ICON infrastructure of the British Investment Fund.

The local authorities support the project because they believe that it will bring in tourism, but many grass root groups reject it because they will affect the sea environment.

“The lighthouse and the bilancioni are a natural film set. Actors like Charlize Theron, Andy Garcia and Uma Thurman came here, ”says Gianfranco Miconi, who is nickname Attila.

He is a retired 72-year-old who has lived and renovated in one of the Stelzenhäuser in the past 30 years who are now threatened with demolition. “This is a nice place,” he says. “If it looks worsened, then because the authorities have never taken care of it.”

The area has been unloved for many years. In 2010, plans were signed for the construction of the largest marina in the Mediterranean, which includes four large docks, a hotel and congress center, commercial space and luxury apartments.

But two years later, the developer Francesco Bellavista Caltagirone was arrested for fraud (he was later acquitted) and the project was abandoned for another decade.

Then, three years ago, the country was bought by Royal Caribbean for € 12 million (£ 10 million). Later it sold 90% of his participation to Icon to transform the port into a facility especially for cruise ships.

In addition to berths for hundreds of smaller boats, there will be two docks for the Oasis class cruise ships, which were the world’s largest and longest passenger ships by 2023. At 72 meters high, they are twice as high as with Fiumicinos lighthouse and can wear up to 5,000 passengers.

“They say this port will bring work,” says Giancarlo Petrelli, a retired engineer who is part of the tables of the port, a group of local associations that has been fighting the development plans since 2010.

“Nobody think of the traffic and pollution that are generated by 5,000 people who go to and from Rome?”

There is already a port that serves Rome – Civitavecchia – but the new facility will offer the cruise industry additional capacities.

Petrelli also fears the effects on coastal erosion. The most important legacy of the original port plan is a 800 meter long wave breaker. This changed the currents by taking sand from the beaches of witnesses and Fregen, which lies north of Isola Sacra.

“The wave crusher has changed the sea ecosystem,” he says. “Now there is only sand, but in the past there were former shellfish like Tellins and inkfish.”

Fiumicinos water are flat: to make room for large ships, the developers would have to extract more than 3 m cubic meters of sand. About a third of it is used to replenish the beaches in Freigen and witnesses according to the project plans.

Federica Giunta, an anthropologist who lives in Fiumicino and for Collettivo no postage The protest group is concerned that the wave breaker would have to be extended to 1,200 meters. In addition, she says: “The entire coast is determined because a separate port is not built far away to accommodate the fishing fleet.”

For Pietro Spirito, former President of the Central Tyrrhenian Sea Authority and professor at Mercatorum University in Rome, the problem is not so much the port itself, but his property.

Although it is not unusual that cruise ships have land where they dock, these are usually small private islands or beaches. “An island is one thing; It is different 20 km from the capital of Italy, ”he says. “The precedent that would be determined let other companies be free to create their private stops in public locations.”

The opponents of the program stick to hope. The Italian government included the project under the work program for the Catholic anniversary year, a celebration that finds a single quarter of a century until January 2026. But the building does not have to be started yet.

Nevertheless, Royal Caribbean plans to visit some ships by November. The idea is to have them forward off the coast and bring passengers ashore in smaller boats.

A spokesman for Fiumicino Waterfront said that the port would “offer a solution to a real need”. The company said that Italy left more berths for tourist ships and the port infrastructure in Lazio, the region around Rome, “in the quality and amount of offers compared to its main competitor, the Barcelona terminal”.

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The spokesman added that the project would employ around 7,000 people – 2,000 in the construction of the port and 5,000 when the work was completed. They said that only a cruise ship could dock in Fiumicino and reduce emissions that the ships would combine with the Onshore power supply instead of using the diesel generators, which normally supplies with cruise ships with festival mower.

Mario Baccini, Mayor of Fiumicino, sees the new port as “historical opportunity that will change the city for the better and free of charge for the community”. He believes that the city will be a “nerve center of tourism”.

Cruise ships, he says, will “create less than 50% of the anniversaries” and add that the “real risk is not the ships, but do not have the full potential that Fiumicino has”.

Back on the beach in Isola Sacra, the sunset approaches and Attila continues to look out of the window of his stilt house.

“I don’t know anything about bureaucracy,” he says. “I only know that this is the most beautiful place in the world and I don’t have the intention to go unless I’m dead.”