ROME, Italy — The Italian government’s mandate of a vaccine “Green Pass” to access cultural sites went into effect Friday, throwing the city of Rome into pandemonium.
The obligation of producing a Green Pass along with its cumbersome verification process created waits of two hours or more under the summer sun at Rome’s touristic hotspots like the Colosseum, the Pantheon, and the Roman Forum, despite the relatively low number of tourists.
In July, acting Prime Minister Mario Draghi issued a decree compelling visitors to present a Green Pass — analogous to a vaccine passport — to attend sporting events, visit museums or other places of culture, eat inside restaurants, enter a movie theater, and a number of other activities, which went into effect on August 6.
The Green Pass can be obtained by receiving full vaccination, presenting proof of having recovered from the coronavirus, or showing a negative result for a coronavirus test carried out within 48 hours. For the last three weeks, long lines have formed daily outside Rome’s post offices where the process to obtain the Green Pass is carried out.
Stories abounded Friday of visitors and tour guides being denied access to sites because of glitches in the system. One Italian guide told Breitbart News that when she finally reached the entrance to the Colosseum after waiting more than an hour and a half in line, she was turned away by the gatekeeper who said her Green Pass had “expired,” despite the fact that she has had a double injection of the coronavirus vaccine.
Isabella Ruggiero, the president of Italy’s Association of Professional Tour Guides (AGTA), told Breitbart News that Friday’s organizational disaster confirmed their worst fears: long lines, extended waits, and general confusion in a sector that is trying desperately to get back on its feet.
“Many causes have contributed to the waste of time,” Ruggiero said, “insufficient personnel and frequent technical ‘problems’ (difficulty in reading the QR code), compounded by those who tried to enter without a Green Pass, many of whom said they had no idea it was even necessary.”
Lines outside Rome’s Colosseum on August 6
“Italian museums and archaeological parks were already among the most ‘COVID-free’ places in the world since last year,” she added, “because of strict limits on the number of visitors, and controls such as temperature-checking and mandatory mask-wearing, even outdoors.”
“We fear that the current situation will result in a further contraction in the number of visitors to museums and monuments, which have already been hard hit, as well as in the cancellation of work for tour guides and yet another blow to the tourism sector in general,” she said.
“It is certainly proving to be a terrible calling card for tourists,” Ruggiero told Breitbart News. “We need strategies to revive the tourism sector, not crush it.”
Line to access Roman Forum on August 6
Line to enter the Pantheon on August 6
Meanwhile, in the southern Italian city of Naples, Fabrizio Masucci, the director of the prestigious Sansevero Chapel Museum, resigned from his post earlier this week in protest against the requirement of the Green Pass in museums, which he deems discriminatory and exploitative.
Masucci noted that museum regulations are already stringent and mandating the Green Pass is not motivated by health reasons but political ones.
Government officials have explained that the decision to require the Green Pass was made “for the stated purpose of obtaining more numerous recruits in the vaccination campaign,” Masucci declared.
“Without entering into the merits of the aims the government has set for itself, and obviously not having any prejudices whatsoever against vaccines, I nevertheless object to the instrumentalization of museums… for achieving any objective foreign to their natural purpose,” he said, especially when that instrumentalization “jeopardizes rather than favoring social cohesion.”
If a museum is asked to renounce equal treatment of visitors for reasons that can only be perceived as instrumental, he noted, “I would quietly recall that museums are by their vocation places of inclusion and that equal access to art and culture is the right of all.”
“I cannot escape the strongest call of my conscience, which leads me to leave (after more than ten and a half years) the presidency and direction of the Sansevero Chapel Museum,” Masucci declared in his resignation letter.
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