Rome’s cultural elite write to Unesco over ‘mortifying’ scenes of rubbish

The mayor of Rome had promised to give the city an ‘extraordinary clean-up’ by last Christmas. Photograph: Antonio Masiello/Getty Images

Culture sector workers, artists, professors and environmentalists living in Rome’s historic centre have urged Unesco to remind the city’s council of its duty to protect the world heritage site as they decried “mortifying” scenes of rubbish and other signs of decay.

In a letter addressed to Lazare Eloundou Assomo, the chief of Unesco’s world heritage centre, and signed by 150 people, the group said its complaints to authorities in the Italian capital had been ignored.