Rome’s horse-drawn carriages, known as botticelle, are a lucrative business, with tour operators charging as much as €350 for horses to cart four people around key monuments of the Italian capital for two hours.

 

A succession of mayors has pledged to ban the practice, with the city’s current leader, Virginia Raggi, making it a campaign promise ahead of her election in June 2016. A year later, the local authorities announced a plan for the horses, who are kept in stables in the Testaccio, to be moved away from the streets to work in the city’s parks instead. The idea of replacing the carriages with electric vehicles was also mooted. The measure, which included a ban on horse-drawn carriages circulating between June and September and when the temperature exceeds 30C, was later passed by a parliamentary transport committee in Italy’s former government. Raggi, from the Five Star Movement, the party ruling nationally with the centre-left Democratic party, reiterated the plan over social media in July while feting Rome as “a leader in safeguarding and protecting animals”. But nothing has changed.