On a cloudy day in January, Isola Sacra, a hamlet in Fiumicino, 20 miles from Rome, does not look like a place that would attract masses of tourists. Low-rise family homes with small gardens alternate with meadows and fields and life has the sedate pace of a provincial town.
An old lighthouse now lies in ruins and not far away is the darsena dei bilancioni, the beach that takes its name from the stilt houses, or bilancioni, once used for fishing.
But this coastal spot at the mouth of the Tiber River is at the centre of a controversy threatening its future tranquility. It is the intended site of a new port called Fiumicino Waterfront, a joint venture between the cruise company Royal Caribbean and the British investment fund Icon Infrastructure.
Local authorities support the project because they believe it will bring in tourism, but many grassroots groups oppose it because of the impact they think it will have on the marine environment.
“The lighthouse and the bilancioni are a natural film set. Actors like Charlize Theron, Andy Garcia and Uma Thurman have come here,” says Gianfranco Miconi, who is nicknamed Attila.
He is a retired 72-year-old who, for the past 30 years, has been living in and renovating one of the stilt houses now threatened with demolition. “This is a lovely place,” he says. “If it looks degraded, it’s because authorities never took care of it.”
For many years the area has been unloved. In 2010, plans were signed off for the construction of what would have been the largest marina in the Mediterranean, comprising four large docks, a hotel and convention centre, commercial spaces and luxury flats.
But two years later, the developer, Francesco Bellavista Caltagirone, was arrested for fraud (he was later acquitted) and the project was abandoned for another decade.
Then, three years ago, the land was bought by Royal Caribbean for €12m (£10m). It later sold 90% of its holding to Icon, with permission to transform the port into a facility specifically for cruise ships.
Now, as well as berths for hundreds of smaller boats, there will be one dock for Oasis-class cruise liners, which were the world’s largest and longest passenger ships until 2023. At 72 metres high, they are twice the height of Fiumicino’s lighthouse and can carry up to 5,000 passengers.
“They say this port will bring work,” says Giancarlo Petrelli, a retired engineer who is part of the Tables of the Port, a group of local associations that has been fighting the development plans since 2010. “But in these cases the sailors are not hired locally and the tourists won’t be interested in Fiumicino, but in Rome.
“Does no one think about the traffic and pollution generated by 5,000 people going to and from Rome?”
There is already a port that serves Rome – Civitavecchia – but the new facility will provide extra capacity for the cruise industry.
Petrelli also worries about the impact on coastal erosion. The most significant legacy of the original port plan is an 800-metre-long breakwater. This altered the currents by taking sand from the beaches of Focene and Fregene, which lie just north of Isola Sacra.
“The breakwater has altered the marine ecosystem,” he says. “Now there’s only sand, but in the past there used to be shellfish, such as tellins, and octopuses.”
Fiumicino’s waters are shallow: to make room for large ships, developers would need to extract more than 3m cubic metres of sand. About a third of it will be used to replenish the beaches in Fregene and Focene, according to the project plans.
Federica Giunta, an anthropologist who lives in Fiumicino and belongs to the Collettivo No Porto protest group, is concerned that the breakwater would have to be extended to 1,200 metres. On top of that, she says, “the entire coastline will be cemented over, since a separate port to house the fishing fleet is being built not far away”.
For Pietro Spirito, former president of the Central Tyrrhenian Sea Authority and professor at Rome’s Mercatorum University, the issue is not so much the port itself but its ownership.
Although it is not uncommon for cruise lines to own land where they dock, these are usually small private islands or beaches. “An island is one thing; being 20km from the capital of Italy is another,” he says. “The precedent that would be set would leave other companies free to create their private stopovers inside public places.”
Opponents of the scheme are holding on to some hope. The Italian government included the project among the programme of works for the Catholic jubilee year, a celebration that happens once every quarter-century and runs until January 2026. Yet building has yet to begin, held up by further assessments and objections.
Nevertheless, Royal Caribbean plans to have some ships visit by November, the company says. The idea is to have them anchor off the coast and then bring passengers ashore in smaller boats.
Defending its plans, a spokesperson for Fiumicino Waterfront said it believed the port would “provide a solution for a real need”. The company said Italy needed more berths for tourist ships and the port infrastructure in Lazio, the region around Rome, “lags behind in quality and quantity of offerings compared with its main competitor, the Barcelona terminal”.
The spokesperson added that the project would employ about 7,000 people – 2,000 in constructing the port and 5,000 when the work was completed. They said that only one cruise ship at a time would be allowed to dock in Fiumicino and to reduce emissions the ships would connect to the onshore electricity supply rather than using the diesel generators that typically power moored cruise ships.
Mario Baccini, mayor of Fiumicino, views the new port as a “historic opportunity, which will change the city for the better and at no cost to the municipality”. He believes the town will become a “nerve centre of tourism”.
Cruise ships, he says, will dock for “less than 50% of the days of the year”, adding that the “real risk is not the ships, but not having the full potential that Fiumicino has”.
Back on the beach in Isola Sacra, sunset is approaching and Attila stops to look out of the window of his stilt house.
