Rome Draws a Line, and It Is the Width of a Golf Cart

The Guardian reports this week from the edge of Piazza Navona, where two visitors from Texas stepped out of a golf cart and into one of the grandest squares in Europe. The city, the paper notes, has begun to crack down on the trade, on the argument that it risks spiralling out of control; the operators, for their part, say they are being singled out unfairly. Both claims can be true at once, which is usually the sign that a city has arrived at a question it can no longer postpone.

What the foreign coverage captures, perhaps without meaning to, is the sequence. Rome has already absorbed the Fiat 500, the Vespa, the tuk-tuk; each was once an intrusion and is now part of the furniture of the place. The golf cart is simply the latest arrival, and the objection to it is not really mechanical. It is that the vehicle makes visible something the city has preferred to keep diffuse: that the historic centre is no longer primarily a place where people live, but a circuit through which people are moved.

Seen from outside, this is a story about tourism. Seen from within, it is a story about the terms of exchange. A city that trades on its own image must decide, repeatedly, how much of the image it is willing to sell and how much it needs to keep for itself. The golf cart is a small thing. But the line it forces Romans to draw is the same line that Venice has been drawing for decades, and Florence more recently, and it will not stay drawn in one place.

We do not take a side between the operators and the authorities; the wire gives us no basis to. We note only that the world's press has found, in a dispute over a slow-moving vehicle, a serviceable emblem for a much older negotiation. Rome is not being asked whether it likes golf carts. It is being asked what it is for.