Gualtieri says Tevere can follow in the footsteps of the Seine by opening to swimmers.Rome mayor Roberto Gualtieri has pledged that the river Tiber will be safe for swimming by 2032, comparing the ambition to the clean-up of the Seine ahead of the Paris Olympics.Speaking on the sidelines of an event on Tuesday, Gualtieri said the city is working on two fronts: restoring navigability along stretches of the river where it is currently interrupted, and making the water clean enough for bathing."We have a work plan that can make the Tevere swimmable by 2032, as happened with the Seine in Paris," the mayor told news agency ANSA. "And we will do it."Paris reopened the Seine to public swimming last year for the first time in a century, following a €1.4 billion clean-up ahead of the 2024 Olympic swimming events.Gualtieri first floated the idea of a swimmable Tiber in the summer of 2025, at the time suggesting the goal was achievable "within five years" and could coincide with the end of a potential second mayoral term.   He said then that the Tevere's water quality problems stemmed largely from industrial discharges into the river and into the Aniene, a tributary that flows into it in the north of the city, and that Rome's metropolitan police had begun screening discharge points along the Aniene as a first step.The mayor also argued at the time that cleaning up the Tevere should cost less than the Seine project, since Paris "started with much higher pollution levels".Swimming in the Tiber was commonplace in Rome until the 1960s, when it was banned due to industrial pollution and the risk of diseases such as leptospirosis.   The sole exception today is New Year's Day, when a group of divers leap from Ponte Cavour into the river's freezing waters as part of a long-standing tradition.

Rome mayor Roberto Gualtieri has pledged that the river Tiber will be safe for swimming by 2032, comparing the ambition to the clean-up of the Seine ahead of the Paris Olympics.