Sheep to tackle Rome’s overgrown parks

Sheep and goats are to be used to tackle Rome’s overgrown and neglected parks and public gardens, the city’s embattled mayor has announced.

The plan follows years of neglect and budget cuts which have left the Italian capital’s public spaces in a dire state, with grass often chest high and benches covered in vegetation.

Seeking a radical solution, Mayor Virginia Raggi, a member of the anti-establishment Five Star Movement which is poised to form a coalition government in Italy, has now proposed using natural grazers to make the city’s green spaces useable again.

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A separate initiative launched in March uses prison inmates to clean up neglected parks.

In fact, Raggi would not be the first mayor to use sheep to keep public spaces under control. Berlin already deploys a small herd of Gotland sheep between May and November to keep down the grass in the gardens of Charlottenburg Palace.

Nevertheless, says The Daily Telegraph, the move has “invited mockery from political opponents”, with Orlando Corsetti, a member of the centre-Left Democratic Party, saying: “Goats and sheep as lawnmowers? It all makes sense.

“Raggi clearly deeply loves animals because she has filled the city with rats, seagulls and wild boar which feed off uncollected rubbish, so a few goats would complete Five Star’s Roman zoo.”

Wild boars have become an increasingly common site on the city’s outskirts.

However, not everyone is so hostile to the idea. A national farming association said there were as many as 50,000 sheep in the countryside around Rome, meaning “the capital can count on a veritable army of natural lawnmowers”.