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Rapaccini’s cobbled street is now bustling day and night with tourists stumbling in and out of cheap restaurants catering exclusively to visitors, not locals, as well as Airbnb rentals. On some nights, she finds the noise so unbearable that she drags a small mattress into her kitchen at the back of her apartment, where it’s quiet enough to sleep. “We’re not used to this confusion, this chaos,” she said from her nearby art studio. “The worst are the Americans. They get drunk outside and make so much noise.”

In Prati, an elegant early 20th-century neighborhood just outside the Vatican City, Chiara Mogavero, a Roman painter and former ballerina, is so disillusioned by what has happened to her "hood"—and to Rome in general—that she plans to move to Paris. She thought her building, situated in a pleasant but less touristy area, would be immune to the Airbnb invasion.

She was wrong. Five Airbnb rentals have recently opened in her five-story building, one of them right next door. Her building is losing its sense of community as locals leave and short-term visitors take over. She can no longer tolerate the constant noise. “You hear doors slamming all the time, even at night. I can hear strangers talking next door, their music. It’s like living in a video game.”

Both Mogavero and many other Romans living in or near Rome's historic center fear that their beloved city is turning into the next Venice—a city overwhelmed by tourists and Airbnbs that are displacing locals and the shops and services they rely on for daily life.

Romans need hardware stores, dry cleaners, and butcher shops. They don’t need more pubs, cheap pizzerias, gelato shops—or neighbors they don’t know. “As more Romans leave, fewer people remain to defend their neighborhoods,” Mogavero said.

I can empathize. When my family and I moved to Italy from Toronto 16 years ago, Rome was certainly a tourist city, but it wasn’t flooded with visitors 24/7, 365 days a year, in every corner of the center. Nor was Airbnb a thing. We live near the southern boundary of Rome’s historic center, close to the headquarters of the Food and Agriculture Organization and the Circus Maximus. Back then, the streets and main avenues near us were full of useful shops. We never needed to drive to buy essentials.

Over the years, many of these businesses have disappeared, replaced by bars, restaurants (most of them not Italian), and gelato shops. The hardware store is gone, along with the dry cleaner, the auto parts store, and the mechanic’s shop. We can’t even buy a light bulb or wrench nearby. On our streets, we hear less Italian and more English, Spanish, German, and Chinese.

The historic center itself, one of the largest in the world, is emptying out. The avenues, piazzas, and narrow streets are full of chain stores catering mostly to visitors (everything from McDonald's to Gap), endless pizzerias and restaurants with street hawkers touting "tourist menus," slow open-top tour buses that enrage Roman drivers, hawkers selling boxer shorts printed with Michelangelo's David, and, most of all, Airbnbs. In May, Starbucks opened its first store in the historic center, serving a drink that horrifies Romans: Frappuccinos.

More than any other factor, short-term rentals—Airbnb is the biggest but not the only platform—are tearing the fabric of the city, especially now that tourism has returned to pre-pandemic levels. The Pantheon alone receives 35,000 to 40,000 visitors daily, according to its security guards. “More and more Romans are leaving because the city center has become too crowded and too expensive,” said Amadeo Biagila, a retired police officer who manages crowd control at the 1,900-year-old Roman temple.

Families that have lived in the heart of Rome for generations are packing up. The population of the historic center has dropped by 20,000 to less than 170,000 in the past three decades, with most of the decline occurring in the past 10 years, coinciding with Airbnb's arrival. (The metro area population is 4.3 million.) City defenders say Airbnb saturation—what they call "desertification"—is transforming Rome into an architectural theme park: Baroque pieces here, ancient ruins there, tourists taking selfies in the middle, and fewer and fewer Romans.

Some local politicians, along with anti-tourism and anti-Airbnb community groups, are fighting this trend. They are calling for a national law to limit short-term holiday rentals, as Italian cities currently have virtually no restrictions on them. Nathalie Naim, an Italo-Canadian city councilor for Rome’s historic center who lives in Monti, has been fighting her neighborhood's degradation for years. She has opposed new liquor licenses allowing businesses like art galleries to sell alcohol. Her proposals for laws to slow or stop the proliferation of Airbnbs have so far gone unheard, though she is finding political allies. “Italy has no brakes on short-term rentals,” she said. “The only thing that matters is making money.”

Suggested restrictions include banning new short-term rental listings, capping the number of listings in specific areas, and limiting the proportion of apartments in buildings that can be rented to tourists. Like many European cities, they also propose limiting the number of days a home can be rented annually: London caps it at 90 days, Paris at 120, and Amsterdam at 30. Rome has no such limits.

A data-driven site monitoring Airbnb’s impact on residential neighborhoods—insideairbnb.com—lists nearly 25,000 Airbnbs in Rome. Most are clustered in or near the historic center, with Trastevere, Piazza Navona, Pantheon, Trevi Fountain, and Vatican areas among the hotspots. The real number is likely thousands higher, as many are believed to be unregistered. Some hosts even rent apartments to sublet them as Airbnbs. Inside Airbnb says two-thirds of hosts in Rome have multiple listings. A short-term rental agency, Iflat, lists 239 Airbnb options.

Maria Luisa Mirabile, a Roman sociologist and member of the Monti neighborhood committee, wrote a report on short-term rentals titled "Rome: A City Too Open." She said the sheer number of tourists isn’t the issue; the problem is their—and the Airbnbs they use—concentration in a small area. Municipal and national governments, she said, could have used the pandemic years of 2020 and 2021, when tourism nearly ceased, to decide what kind of visitors they wanted to sustain the economy. Instead, they chose mass tourism, opening the market to thousands of short-term apartments.

Her report states that short-term rentals have caused “the replacement of the resident population with a transient population that has no memory of the past nor interest in the future of these places.”

Rapaccini recalls when Monti was a quiet, authentic haven for artists and locals. She and her late partner, Oscar-nominated director Mario Monicelli, moved to Monti in 1988. The area was unfashionable, dirty, and filled with prostitutes but beautiful in its gritty way. “It was like a small village,” even though it was in the heart of a large and vibrant city, she said. Apartments were cheap, and the area began attracting film types, journalists, and artisans—none of them wealthy—who easily mingled with local workers and shop owners.

Then Monti started to change. It was discovered, and money began to flow in. Rapaccini and Monicelli decided to make a short film about their little world. “We realized we had to record what Monti was like before everything disappeared,” she said.

The film Vicino al Colosseo c’è Monti, released in 2006, shows scenes of daily life: a barber shaving men’s beards, boys sparring in a dingy boxing club, an orchestra performing in the streets, old men playing cards at an outdoor table, nuns and priests coming and going, carpenters working in their ateliers, chefs cooking honest peasant food in simple restaurants—not a tourist in sight.

They were right. Monti would soon change completely, becoming alarmingly similar to Trastevere, the old district on the Tiber River's left bank, just south of the Vatican. Fifty years ago, Trastevere was like Monti 20 years ago. Today, Trastevere is a nonstop party, full of tourists, Airbnbs, noisy bars, and streets littered with trash and broken beer bottles.

Rapaccini sees Monti heading down the same path. She coined a word for its transformation: “Trasteverized,” a play on Trastevere and terrorized. “It’s impossible to change this situation in Rome,” she said. “It’s all about money, money, money, not preservation. More tourism, more alcohol, more Airbnb. I’m so sad about it.”