The vocations of Walter Veltroni

I've just read an excellent article in the New York Review of Books which is also available on line.
Entitled Rome: The Marvels and the Menace and written by Ingrid D. Rowland it dishes out some harsh criticism of Rome's Mayor Walter Veltroni:

[...] Rome is now in the hands of a mayor whose vocations lie elsewhere. Earnest and self-dramatizing, Walter Veltroni creates film festivals and "White Nights," escorts high school students to Rwanda, Malawi, and Auschwitz, and hobnobs with the likes of Bob Geldof, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Rigoberta Menchu from his Michelangelo-designed city hall. He has just written his first novel. He is a man for spectacle rather than infrastructure; to be sure, he is putting in a new subway, but it is the old subway lines that need his attention, with their deteriorating physical plant and their alarming increase in violence. [...]

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