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Rome: Disability Access Wasn’t Built in a Day

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August 9, 2015

There we were at the Vatican on a hot, sweaty Italian afternoon last week with our son, Danny, who has physical disabilities, and discovered that the only way for us to access Michelangelo’s famed Sistine Chapel was for Danny to use a wheelchair lift on the stairwell. Due to the tight space and the hordes of tourists, the Vatican guards had to halt all the foot traffic in order to activate the wheelchair lift. On seeing this ad hoc solution, I turned to the guard and said, “There’s a concept called universal design. If you pulled out the stairs and put in a ramp, everyone could access the Sistine Chapel at the same time.” He nodded his head, said it was a good idea, but that it wasn’t going to happen anytime soon.

And so it went during our trip to Rome – good intentions, mostly kind and helpful people but accessible systems that didn’t always work as planned.  According the to the “Disabled World” website, “many new building projects in Rome have taken the disabled into account and are now providing ramps and lifts features that would not have been in place perhaps a decade ago.” But, even with those positive changes, accessibility is still a long way from Americans with Disability Act (ADA) standards. Disabled-marked corridors led to elevators that were out of service, mismarked or didn’t stop on the right floors. On the public buses, there were clearly marked disability doors and spaces, but the ramps were never lowered by the bus drivers, so other passengers had to help us get off and on with our son’s large stroller. Many key tourist sites were surrounded by ancient cobblestone roads, giving Danny a very bumpy ride, which he actually got to like — he started to gleefully yell out, “bump, bump, bump” whenever he saw the cobblestones ahead.

Restaurant employees were uniformly helpful, and often cleared the way between crowded tables for us to get to a table, and then stored away the collapsed stroller. Seeing that Danny was having trouble eating his favorite Margarita Pizza, waiters brought over sharp knives and cut the pizza into smaller pieces for him. In the Jewish Quarter, the owner of the Kosher Carne restaurant saw that Danny wasn’t eating the bun of his hot dog, and then gave our son an extra hot dog without charge. And more than once, we received cookies on the house from sympathetic wait staff.

Given the logistical challenges of getting around Rome, it’s not surprising that we didn’t see many other tourists, or even Italian residents, who were using a wheelchair or walker. But it is clear that the Italian authorities are trying hard to bring their ancient city up to 21st century accessibility, and in the meantime, the people who visit and live there are filling in the gaps.

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