The ancient Flaminian Way which enters northern Rome was once flanked by a procession of soaring umbrella pines topped by pillowy green canopies, making it one of the most stunning routes into the city.
However, it has become one of the most depressing ways into the city as the pine tortoise scale insect kills off the trees, turning them into threadbare collections of desiccated branches that recall a Christmas tree found in a rubbish skip in mid-January.
After arriving from the US in 2014, the insect has killed thousands of the pines that define Rome’s skyline and help justify its claim to being the most beautiful city in the world. With 80 percent of surviving trees infested, the city is fighting back by injecting 50,000 pines with chemicals against the bug but parks have already been devastated, avenues are full of stumps and two pine forests just outside of Rome no longer exist.
A plague that could have been stopped in time has instead become a textbook example of how political inertia, buck-passing and incompetence can lead to disaster.
Flavio Tarquini, the head of the city’s botanical gardens, said: “The city could have kept the bug at bay if it had acted in time but now [it] risks losing most of its pines, and Rome without pines will not be Rome.”
The trees do not just make Rome look good, they are closely linked to the city’s ancient origins, Tarquini said: “They were seen as sacred by the ancient Romans because, according to legend, Aeneas, the forefather of the founders of the city, built the ship he used to sail to Italy with pinewood.”
Many of Rome’s iconic pines were planted by Benito Mussolini in the 1930s to evoke the city’s imperial past. With a lifespan of up to 200 years, they should have had another century of life in them.
But the insect has made other plans.
“Rome without pines will not be Rome.”
Honeydew is secreted onto the needles of the trees, which attracts mould, blocking photosynthesis and ensuring the tree dies within two to three years.
First spotted near Naples, the bug then headed north, reaching Rome in 2018 where the city’s tree maintenance contracts had stalled after a kickback scandal. Virginia Raggi, who was the mayor and a member of the anti-establishment Five Star party, struggled to fill city council positions. Between February and September 2019 she had no one in charge of Rome’s greenery.
“After seeing the damage the bug did around Naples, everyone knew how aggressive it was, but there was political paralysis in Rome,” said Susanna Spafford, a lawyer and activist who won a meeting with officials in October 2019 after threatening legal action.
“We told them how the Vatican was experimenting with new treatments on its trees — which have worked — and they said they would start treating Rome’s pines,” she said.
But it was only a year later that the city said it was injecting trees with the chemicals needed to save them and it would treat 5,000 by July 2021, a mere 10 per cent of the city’s total.
The work was too little too late, proven in Testaccio, Rome where specimens in the Non-Catholic Cemetery remain healthy — after prompt treatment by the cemetery’s managers in July 2020 — while a line of publicly maintained pines in the adjacent Via Caio Cestio have died.
Raggi’s officials blamed central government and the regional authorities for failing to give guidelines on treating trees and they had a point: a government decree was not issued until June 2021. But once it was issued, those same city officials failed to follow the decree’s instruction to tell private owners to give the $105 injection to the pines in their gardens — missing out on another 50,000 trees.
“Trees in gardens — but also police barracks and hospitals — were dying because no one was told to treat them,” said Spafford.
A plague that could have been stopped, were it not for political inertia, led to disaster.
A new mayor elected in 2021, Roberto Gualtieri, has stepped up treatments of the surviving pines in streets and parks but has allegedly continued to do little to alert Romans to save the trees in their gardens.
Gian Pietro Cantiani, an arborist who has worked as a consultant for the city, said: “Experts even created a public information campaign and gave it to the town hall to use, but it’s still in a drawer somewhere there.”
The good news is that where politicians have stumbled, a tiny ladybird may succeed in halting the pine tortoise scale.
The Montezuma ladybird lives on the only island in Turks and Caicos where the pine tortoise scale has not laid waste to the pines. Pio Federico Roversi, who researches plant protection for the Italian government, said: “We have imported 400 of them and we are ready to release them in March to see if they eat the bugs.”
Tom Kington is a Rome-based journalist
