Romans must wait a lot longer for completion of new metro line that is only a third built after 15 years

There’s no equivalent in Italian to our phrase “hostage to fortune”. Had there been, Rome’s mayor Ignazio Marino might not have organised a high-profile photo opportunity dependent on the city’s new metro C line delivering him from A to B without a hitch.

In the event, gremlins struck and Mr Marino was stuck in the carriage with the press photographers gleefully snapping his discomfort as he waited for the doors to open. And Atac, the capital’s troubled public transport system, took another hit.

A 10-minute delay at the inauguration was peanuts, however, compared to the 15 years that Romans have been waiting for the new metro line to connect the south-east of the city with the centre.

But after endless hold-ups, rising costs and even a judicial investigation, the first commuters boarded the new line on an unseasonably warm Monday morning. But not all of them were impressed.

“It’s rubbish. All this time and it’s still not going past the suburbs,” said one traveller, 31-year-old Filippo Gomme.

Another local, Marco, 32, said the Centocelle station, which is currently the most central stop, looked “modern and welcoming”.

“I just wished it went right into the city,” he said. A decade and a half after construction began, only 8km of the 25km track is open.

The first 15 stops, which carry passengers from the furthest south-east periphery of the capital at Pantano, halfway to the centre at Centocelle, certainly look the part. There are losts of gleaming stainless steel surfaces, clean colours and automatic platform safety doors as seen on London’s Jubilee Tube line.

Mayor Marino was upbeat despite the initial delay at Sunday’s launch. “We have a metro that functions perfectly,” he said. “It’s a driverless system, completely safe, with doors that open in co-ordination with the train’s arrival at the platform. All in all, it’s one of the most advanced systems in Europe.”

It’s certainly not the most extensive, though. There are now two and a half metro lines in a capital city of nearly three million people. Authorities have certainly been hindered by the Eternal City’s innumerable archaeological treasures, which had to be protected and often avoided while constructing line C.

But some problems are more difficult to excuse. One of Rome’s own councillors, Luca Pancalli, complained that as a wheelchair-bound traveller, he would have difficulty boarding the train because the carriage floor was higher than the platform.

Outside the metro station, another local said she wouldn’t be using line C, even when its path to the centre of the city was finally complete. “I go to work in my car. And I like it. There are too many thieves and dodgy types on the metro,” said shopworker Alessia Mariani, 29.

The next part of the track, to San Giovanni, is supposed to open by Christmas 2015, as line C crawls westwards towards the centre. But within hours of this week’s inauguration, reports suggested that deadline was now in doubt.

The ETA for line C at Ottaviano, the last stop, across the river Tiber past the Vatican, is 2023. La Stampa has predicted the total cost by then will have risen to €4bn (£3.1bn), making line C cost €160m per km, the most expensive metro line in the world.