DOWN BY THE RIVER.(The Talk of the Town; cleaning up Italy's Tiber River)

Kristin Jones has a watchword that has guided her long struggle to make public art in Rome: " 'No' is an inspiration." Until last week, Jones's Eternaltiber project had endured years of inspiration, dispensed by a wide range of Roman bureaucrats. The origins of the project, which seeks to transform the Tiber River permanently, go back to 1983, when Jones, a recent graduate of Yale's School of Art, went to Rome and discovered, as many visitors do, that the Tiber is perhaps the most neglected part of the city--confined far below street level in a smelly and derelict stone channel, a forlorn and forbidding place. Jones was then beginning to evolve what has become her mission: making the world better through artistic "interventions." Now forty-eight, she has created installations and projects in museums and cities around the world, but saving the Tiber (as she puts it) has become her life's work.

Just because the Tiber is neglected, however, doesn't mean that it's unmanaged. In fact, as Jones found, it is micromanaged. There are various city, state, and regional agencies responsible for the water volume, the water quality, the river bottom, the embankments, the forty-foot-high walls; even the graffiti on these walls is under official control. The result is anarchy. "I once thought it would be interesting to make an organizational flowchart of all the different river authorities and their relationship to each other," Jones said last week. "But I realized that I could never draw it, because you'd need a dimension that hasn't been discovered." The so-called "spontaneous trees" that grow through the travertine at the river's edge are the only part of the river that is free from management--and, because no one is in charge of them, they can't be touched, either.

Over the years, "for the sake of the forsaken Tiber," Jones has met with virtually every important official in Rome, from the mayor, Walter Veltroni, on down. She has the exasperating habit of presenting her own artistic ambitions as a gift to the city, and then haranguing the authorities for not realizing how lucky they are. If she hadn't been an artist, she'd have made a good missionary, of the flinty New England variety, like Katharine Hepburn in "The African Queen." Perhaps the authorities were wary of American do-gooders. Maybe they'd heard about "Metronome," Jones's notorious 1999 public work ...