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Rome’s mayor has ordered a woman to stop feeding dozens of pigeons that have overrun an apartment block, after furious residents, claiming to be drowning in feathers and guano, demanded relief from what has been described as a Hitchcockian nightmare.
For several months, on the third floor of a building at 108 Via Spartaco, a woman nicknamed “The Pigeon Lady” by the press has been feeding the flock of birds that has been plaguing the block. After countless complaints from residents, exasperated by the thick layer of guano covering the building’s interior and the public areas below – not to mention the parked cars – local authorities issued an order banning her from feeding the pigeons.
Reached by intercom by the local news site Roma Today, the woman replied: “I’m an animal rights activist with the Italian League for Bird Protection – a major environmental organisation in Italy dedicated to wildlife conservation. I rescue animals in distress; I don’t feed them for a hobby. I rescue pigeons and other animals like cats and dogs,” she said. “I put out the food in order to save them. Obviously, if I put food out for one pigeon, others were bound to come. But there have been so many lies, slanders and threats against me.”
Asked about the filth caused by the birds’ droppings, she added: “I’ll fix it – for myself, for the people living here, and for the poor pigeons who are the real victims. In the meantime, I’ve stopped putting out feed; I hope they’ll go away. They get run over here.”
Neighbours have repeatedly filmed the woman allegedly feeding the birds, placing food on the ledge of her window – “the lady doesn’t care at all about our discomfort,” one resident told the popular programme La Vita in Diretta on the national broadcaster Rai. “She keeps feeding them seeds, bits of ham and chicken, making our lives hell.”
Another neighbour told Rai that the pigeons “keep breeding and laying eggs”, while others described to Roma Today how the street was “entirely covered in guano”, the pavements “impassable and the stench nauseating”, cars “systematically soiled” and balconies abandoned. Every attempt to persuade her to stop failed despite a municipal bylaw explicitly forbidding the systematic feeding of pigeons anywhere in Rome.
One woman told the news site FanPage: “We are prisoners in our own homes, hostages to a ridiculous situation that has made daily life unbearable. After years of putting up with this and trying to talk, we can’t take it anymore.”
Rocco Ferraro, a city councillor and environment delegate for Rome’s metropolitan area, said the droppings and the birds’ presence had “devalued the homes and made them difficult to sell”.
While Rome’s city government said there was “no direct evidence yet of health problems”, it did warn of the potential risk.
The mayor, Roberto Gualtieri, has therefore ordered “a ban on feeding pigeons and other wild birds, explicitly forbidding the throwing of feed or food scraps on the ground”. In addition, residents of the third-floor flat must, “at their own expense, within 10 days of receiving the order, carry out cleaning, sanitation, pest control and disinfection of the affected areas, restoring appropriate hygiene, safety and health conditions”.
After an alleged complaint from a man who claimed the woman had continued feeding the pigeons despite the mayor’s order, a municipal police patrol was dispatched to the site. But according to media reports, since Thursday no one had actually seen her feeding the birds.
In case of non-compliance, the authorities of Rome’s VII municipality have been instructed to “prepare an intervention plan for the forced execution of the order, using law enforcement if necessary”.
