It's better, right? Piazza San Silvestro, located in the heart of commercial and tourist Rome--2 minutes from Galleria Sardi and 5 minutes from the
Trevi Fountain--used to be a major bus depot of the open air kind. Dozens of buses stopped or turned around there. It was convenient for shoppers, but arguably a waste of a large piazza, not to mention a source of pollution.
And so the authorities decided the bus depot would have to go--indeed, cars, too, would be banned from most of the piazza, which would become a place for pedestrians to chill out, for mothers to walk the baby in the stroller without worrying about traffic, and for tourists to sit down at one of the long, curving benches, have a look at their maps, and admire the piazza's churches.
Demolition of the bus structures began in 2012.
And here's the result:
Today, people sit in the piazza (though not much in the heat of the day, for there are no umbrellas or other shelters from the sun), and mothers walk their babies, and no doubt tourists are glad to have place to sit and browse their guidebooks for what's in the area. So in some sense the new piazza works. But there's something missing, too: energy, a focus of activity, trees, enough people to more or less fill the vastness and give the space proportion--and a place to get relief from the sun. In some sense, it doesn't work.
Bill
