Rome's smart city is about managing an ancient, congested, chronically-troubled capital rather than reinventing it. Its oldest and sharpest move — electronic access gates around the historic core since 2001 — set the pattern: control rooms, contactless fares, leak-hunting on a leaky network and modest citizen apps, with the 2025 Jubilee forcing the biggest push of all.
The atlas documents 10 projects in Rome, the earliest dating to 2001: 1 with a documented success, 9 still running without a verdict. Every entry carries an evidence grade — the strongest here is official (9 entries) — and links its sources.
Three entries that show what Rome is actually doing.
Computed from the 10 entries below — a profile, not a score.
Rome's smartest mobility move is also its oldest: the electronic ZTL gates that have fenced the ~4.2 km² historic centre with transponders and number-plate cameras since 2001, one of Europe's first camera-enforced access zones. Managing traffic in an impossibly dense ancient city became the organising instinct: Roma Servizi per la Mobilità opened a city-wide Mobility Control Centre in 2010, pulling CCTV, roadside sensors, variable-message signs and the ZTL gates into one room, and in 2014 launched Muoversi a Roma, publishing the city's transit as open GTFS feeds that flow into Moovit and Google Maps.
The next layer was utility infrastructure, driven largely by the municipal multi-utility Acea. From 2015 its grid company began converting Rome's roughly 206,000 street lights to remotely-managed LED, and from 2018 Acea Ato 2 started carving the 13,000-km water network into sensor-monitored district-metered areas to chase notoriously high losses — still around 28% in the city, honestly reported. The city's own open-data portal (2018) opened municipal datasets under a Creative Commons licence, if more modestly than Milan or Bologna.
Rome came later and more modestly to citizen-facing digital services, building on a chronically strained administrative and waste base. Tap&Go contactless fares reached the metro in 2019 and buses from 2022; the My Rhome citizen dashboard (2021) let residents file and track service requests online; and from 2024 the waste utility AMA began deploying solar sensor bins — a genuine but small smart layer against Rome's long-running waste dysfunction.
The single biggest, most visible deployment came as a deadline. For the 2025 Catholic Holy Year, Rome opened an AI-guided Jubilee Situation Room in Garbatella, built with Leonardo — roughly 3,000 cameras and sensors reading real-time crowd density and flows at St Peter's and other sites so police, civil protection and health services can respond. The Jubilee did for Rome what a strategy document could not: it forced the city's scattered systems into one coordinated smart layer.
On a time axis, by the year each one started — 2001 to 2024. Pick a dot to read what it was.
✔ Every published entry is checked against the public sources it cites before publication.
Editorial links between Rome's own entries — the city as a system, not a list.
Plans and announced trajectories — not yet documented results.
Rome's challenge is continuity after the Jubilee spotlight fades: whether the Situation Room becomes permanent civic infrastructure or is mothballed, whether Acea's leak-hunting keeps eroding losses that remain among Italy's highest, and whether modest tools like My Rhome and AMA's sensor bins scale beyond pilots on a strained administrative base. Rome's record is honest and unglamorous: it uses smart tech to cope with an ancient, overloaded city, and its next test is doing so consistently rather than only when the world is watching.
Where Rome appears in the atlas's own analysis.
Three cities the atlas reads next to Rome — the reason first, then the entries it rests on. Chosen by hand from the Rome threads below, not counted out of them.
Two cities running the same municipal stack against the same inheritance: heavy losses in old water mains fought district by district, a control room built around cameras, and a bus feed opened so other people's apps can use it.
Two traffic control towers built five years apart on the same idea, and two opposite answers on waste: Rome senses when a bin is full, Seoul bills the household by the kilo.
Two capitals running the same utility stack at the same scale: hundreds of thousands of tele-managed light points apiece, acoustic sensors hunting leaks in old mains, and a contactless fare that arrived by different routes.
Every editorial link from Rome's entries into another city, strongest first. Each one is a statement about two projects, not about two cities — the three above are the ones the atlas is willing to make at city level.
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “Smart-city projects in Rome, Italy.” The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/cities/rome/ (last verified 2026-08-27). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.