A Rome zoologist says the Italian capital has become a “real jungle” due to high temperatures and the city’s ongoing garbage problem, with numbers of snakes, oriental hornets, seagulls and rats soaring.
Andrea Lunerti, a well-known Rome catcher of dangerous animals, said he had been inundated with calls this summer, mostly reports of snake sightings.
“There are a lot more snake sightings than before,” Lunerti said. “The snake population has grown exponentially in the winter because the temperatures have been so warm. If it had been cold, they wouldn’t have survived. Then they come from their natural habitat to the city because there is a lot of food waste, and where there is food waste, there are rats – their main prey.”
The most common species of snake in Rome is the rat snake, although Lunerti also caught four vipers.
On Friday morning, he received a call from a traumatized woman after a rat snake fell on her terrace. Recently, he was also called at night by the police, asking him to remove a snake found in the doctors’ dressing room of a hospital in the Parioli district.
“You can find them on terraces, in gardens, in school buildings,” he said. “One was even hanging on the grate of an elevator in a residential building, causing great panic. The snakes are very adept at finding hiding places in buildings and waiting for the right moment to disappear and hunt their prey.”
Lunerti asks his callers to send him videos of the snakes so he can identify whether they are poisonous or not. “But even the non-poisonous ones cause chaos because they panic people, which causes them to do dangerous things, like running across the road without looking.”
The Oriental hornet, a species of wasp native mainly to North Africa and Southeast Asia, has also had a strong presence in Rome since 2021. They were first spotted in the Monteverde district before nests began to sprout in the niches of shutters, ventilation shafts, air conditioning units and even in the crevices of ancient monuments in the city center.
Their spread is also a result of higher temperatures and garbage.
Lunerti said: “Rome really needs to get its waste management under control, otherwise we will see more snakes and hornets, not to mention the rats and seagulls – there are more seagulls in Rome than in Fregene (a coastal town near Rome).”
He said that at least the seagulls played the role of killing rats and snakes.
“A snake was caught by a seagull and thrown onto a terrace,” he said. “The city has become a real jungle.”
