Roma’s Stadio della Roma Delayed Again

Yesterday Roma’s dream of the Stadio Della Roma was met with more opposition. As reported by Il Tempo, the superintendent of Archaeology, Fine Arts and Landscape, Margherita Eichberg, submitted a negative report to Roma’s city council of urban planning claiming an appropriate landscape survey was not carried out and the proposed project would pose a risk to “monuments and landscape.”

Complicating matters further, the same day Paolo Berdini, Roma’s city council urban planning expert, criticized the estimated 200 million it would cost in taxpayer money.

Berdini apparently doesn’t believe the club’s claim that the project would contribute a revenue of nearly 20 billion euro to the city over the next decade, commenting: "It's a project that I don't consider positive and which won't benefit the city's treasury." Berdini continued in a scathing tone, "You can be certain that this vice of paying for huge projects with public debt will end forever with this administration." Ouch.

That’s not much better than previous administrations. When first presented in March 2014, then-mayor Ignazio Marino acknowledged that the complex could not open until an extensive amount of transport infrastructure was completed around the proposed site of Tor di Valle.

With what seems to be by now a catalogue of delays and obstacles one is left to wonder if the Stadio Della Roma will ever happen. Something has got to give sooner or later though, as the nearly sixty year old Olimpico doesn’t have much life left in her.

Perhaps James Pallotta’s promise of a club that was by now supposed to rival Juventus was a bit premature.