Fume-Choked Italian Cities Fight Back With Restrictions on Autos

ROME â€”  All roads may lead to Rome, but you can’t get there by car: Embarrassed at its inability to make fume-choked cities livable again, official Italy again declared war on the automobile Monday.

The catalyst for the latest in a losing campaign against internal combustion is a vast cloud of noxious muck that has become a regular winter visitor over nearly all of Italy.

Nowadays, sunny Italian skies more often than not look like a particularly bad day in Mexico City. Pollution, redolent with sulfur and carbon monoxide, has become as familiar as pasta to urban Italians.

With pollution levels soaring above danger levels, mayors of 11 major cities Monday enacted Draconian bans on the automobile, which they blame for most of the mess.

All private traffic was forbidden during seven working hours in Milan and for the whole day in Florence. Rome was closed to traffic for three hours Monday.

Alternate schemes, allowing motorists with different license plate numbers to take to the streets for varying durations in bewildering complexities, were imposed in Turin, Varese, Bologna, Modena, Trieste, Bolzano, Naples and Bari.

Critics charge that stop-go restrictions are political expedients that buy time until wind or rain intervenes. They produce more chaos than clear air, say environmentalists, but the very fact of the bans allows officials to declare victory after a day or two.