By JOSHUA GOODMAN, Associated Press

MIAMI (AP) — The federal agent had a daring pitch for Nicolás Maduro’s chief pilot: All he had to do was surreptitiously divert the Venezuelan president’s plane to a place where U.S. authorities could nab the strongman.

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In exchange, the agent told the pilot in a clandestine meeting, the aviator would be made a very rich man.

The conversation was tense, and the pilot left noncommittal, though he provided the agent, Edwin Lopez, with his cell number — a sign he might be interested in helping the U.S. government.

Over the next 16 months, even after retiring from his government job in July, Lopez kept at it, chatting with the pilot over an encrypted messaging app.

The untold, intrigue-filled saga of how Lopez tried to flip the pilot has all the elements of a Cold War spy thriller — luxury private jets, a secret meeting at an airport hangar, high-stakes diplomacy and the delicate wooing of a key Maduro lieutenant. There was even a final machination aimed at rattling the Venezuelan president about the pilot’s true loyalties.

More broadly, the scheme reveals the extent — and often slapdash fashion — to which the U.S. has for years sought to topple Maduro, who it blames for destroying the oil-rich nation’s democracy while providing a lifeline to drug traffickers, terrorist groups and communist-run Cuba.

Since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has taken an even harder line. This summer, the president has deployed thousands of troops, attack helicopters and warships to the Caribbean to attack fishing boats suspected of smuggling cocaine out of Venezuela. In 10 strikes, including a few in the eastern Pacific Ocean, the U.S. military has killed at least 43 people.

This month, Trump authorized the CIA to conduct covert actions inside Venezuela, and the U.S. government has also doubled the bounty for Maduro’s capture on federal narco-trafficking charges, a move that Lopez sought to leverage in a text message to the pilot.

“I’m still waiting for your answer,” Lopez wrote the pilot on Aug. 7, attaching a link to a Justice Department press release announcing the reward had risen to $50 million.

Details of the ultimately unsuccessful plan were drawn from interviews with three current and former U.S. officials, as well as one of Maduro’s opponents. All spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were either not authorized to discuss the effort or feared retribution for disclosing it. The Associated Press also reviewed — and authenticated — text exchanges between Lopez and the pilot.

Attempts to locate the pilot, Venezuelan Gen. Bitner Villegas, were not successful.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the State Department did not comment. The Venezuelan government did not respond to a request for comment.

It started with a tip on Maduro’s planes

The plot was hatched when a tipster showed up at the U.S. Embassy in the Dominican Republic on April 24, 2024, when Joe Biden was president. The informant purported to have information about Maduro’s planes, according to three of the officials familiar with the matter.

Lopez, 50, was then an attaché at the embassy and agent for Homeland Security Investigations, a part of the Department of Homeland Security.

A wiry former U.S. Army Ranger from Puerto Rico, Lopez was leading the agency’s investigations into transnational criminal networks with a presence in the Caribbean, after a storied career taking down drug gangs, money launderers and fraudsters. His work dismantling an illicit money-changing operation in Miami even earned him a public rebuke in 2010 from Hugo Chávez, Maduro’s predecessor. The embassy assignment was to be his last before retirement.

The embassy was closed, although Lopez was still at his desk. He was handed a 3×5 index card with the tipster’s name and phone number. When he called, the tipster claimed that two planes used by Maduro were in the Dominican Republic undergoing costly repairs.

This combination of images obtained from 2025 documents released by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida, shows a Dassault Falcon 900 EX, with the tail number T7-ESPRT, that was seized in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, at the request of the United States in May 2024, top, and a Dassault Falcon 2000EX, with the tail number YV3360, seized in Santo Domingo at the request of the United States in February 2025, bottom. (U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida via AP)

Lopez was intrigued: He knew that any maintenance was most likely a criminal violation under U.S. law because it would’ve involved the purchase of American parts, prohibited by sanctions on Venezuela. The planes were also subject to seizure – for violating those same sanctions.

Locating the aircraft was easy – they were housed in La Isabela executive airport in Santo Domingo. Tracing them to Maduro would take federal investigators months. As they built that case, they learned that the Venezuelan president had dispatched five pilots to the island to retrieve the multimillion-dollar jets – a Dassault Falcon 2000EX and Dassault Falcon 900EX.

A plan comes together

Lopez had an epiphany, according to the current and former officials familiar with the operation: What if he could persuade the pilot to fly Maduro to a place where the U.S. could arrest him?

Maduro had been indicted in 2020 on federal narco-terrorism charges accusing him of flooding the U.S. with cocaine.

The DHS agent secured permission from his superiors and Dominican authorities to question the pilots, overcoming the officials’ concerns about creating a diplomatic rift with Venezuela.

At the airport hangar, a short distance from the jet, Lopez and fellow agents asked each pilot to join them individually in a small conference room. There was no agenda, the agents said. They just wanted to talk.

The agents pretended not to know that the pilots spent their time jetting around Maduro and other top officials. They spoke to each airman for about an hour, saving their biggest target for last: Villegas, who the agents had determined was Maduro’s regular pilot.

Villegas was a member of the elite presidential honor guard and colonel in the Venezuelan air force. A former Venezuelan official who regularly traveled with the president described him as friendly, reserved and trusted by Maduro. The planes he flew were used to shuttle Maduro across the globe –- often to U.S. adversaries like Iran, Cuba and Russia. In a December 2023 video posted online by Maduro, Villegas can be seen holding up a radio in the cockpit as the president trades patriotic slogans with the pilot of a Russian Sukhoi fighter jet.

Lopez called Villegas into the room, and they bantered for a while about celebrities the pilot had shuttled around, his military service and the types of jets he was licensed to fly, according to two of the people familiar with the operation. After about 15 minutes, the pilot began to grow tense, and his legs started to shake.

The agent drilled in more sharply: Had the pilot ever flown Chávez or Maduro? Villegas at first tried to dodge the questions, but eventually admitted he had been a pilot for both leaders. Villegas showed the agents photos on his phone of him and the two presidents on various trips. He also provided details about Venezuelan military installations he had visited. Unbeknownst to Villegas, one of Lopez’s colleagues recorded the conversation on a cell phone.

As the conversation wrapped up, the two people said, Lopez made his pitch: In exchange for secretly ferrying Maduro into America’s hands, the pilot would become very rich and beloved by millions of his compatriots. The rendezvous could be of the pilot’s choosing: the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico or the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Villegas didn’t tip his hand. Yet, before departing, he gave Lopez his cell number.

‘Treasure trove of intelligence’

Villegas and the other pilots returned to Venezuela without the aircraft, which they were told lacked the proper clearances.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government was assembling a federal forfeiture case to seize the jets. It seized one, registered in the European microstate of San Marino to a shell company from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, in September 2024.

It seized the other in February during the first overseas trip by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the top U.S. diplomat.

At a press conference at the airport in the Dominican Republic, Lopez briefed the secretary in front of the press. Lopez told Rubio that the plane contained a “ treasure trove of intelligence,” including the names of Venezuelan air force officers and detailed information about its movements. Lopez affixed a seizure warrant to the jet.

FILE – U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, right, listens to Edwin F. Lopez, the attaché for DHS Homeland Security Investigations, second from left, next to the Venezuelan government airplane that Rubio announced is being seized by the U.S. during a news conference at La Isabela International Airport in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Feb. 6, 2025. At left is Dominican Public Prosecutor Enmanuel Ramirez, and holding the “seized” sign is Robert Cunniff from the U.S. Department of Commerce. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, Pool, File)

Maduro’s government reacted angrily, releasing a statement that accused Rubio of “brazen theft.”

Even in retirement, Lopez kept going

As he assembled the forfeiture in concert with other federal agencies, Lopez focused on coaxing Villegas to join his plot.

The task would not be easy. Maduro had made it exceedingly costly for anyone who turns against him. Since taking office in 2013, he has brutally repressed protests, leading to scores of arrests, while jailing even once-powerful allies suspected of disloyalty.

Even so, Lopez plugged away. The pair texted on WhatsApp and Telegram about a dozen times. But the conversations seemed to go nowhere.

In July, Lopez retired. But he couldn’t let Villegas go. He sought guidance from the tight-knit community of exiled opposition leaders he got to know as a lawman. One described the former agent as obsessed with bringing Maduro to justice.

“He felt he had an unfinished mission to complete,” said an exiled member of Maduro’s opposition who spoke on the condition of anonymity over concerns about his safety. That commitment, he added, makes Lopez “more valuable to us than many of Maduro’s biggest opponents inside Venezuela.”

After the August text about the $50 million reward, Lopez sent another saying there was “still time left to be Venezuela’s hero and be on the right side of history.” But he did not hear back.

On Sept. 18, Lopez was watching the news of Trump’s buildup in the Caribbean when he saw a post on X by an anonymous plane spotter who had closely tracked the comings and goings of Maduro’s jetliners over the years, according to three of the people familiar with the matter. The user, @Arr3ch0, a play on Venezuelan slang for “furious,” posted a screenshot of a flight tracking map that showed a presidential Airbus making an odd loop after taking off from Caracas.

“Where are you heading?” wrote Lopez, using a new number.

“Who is this?” responded Villegas, either not recognizing the number or feigning ignorance.

When Lopez pressed about what they discussed in the Dominican Republic, Villegas grew combative, calling Lopez a “coward.”

“We Venezuelans are cut from a different cloth,” Villegas wrote. “The last thing we are is traitors.”

Lopez sent him a photo of them talking to each other on a red leather couch at the airplane hangar the previous year.

“Are you crazy?” Villegas replied.

“A little…,” wrote Lopez.

Two hours later, Lopez tried one last time, mentioning Villegas’ three children by name and a better future he said awaited them in the U.S.

“The window for a decision is closing,” Lopez wrote, shortly before Villegas blocked his number. “Soon it will be too late.”

Trying to rattle Maduro

Realizing that Villegas wasn’t going to join the plan, Lopez and others in the anti-Maduro movement decided to try to unnerve the Venezuelan leader, according to three of the people familiar with the operation.

The day after the testy WhatsApp exchange between Lopez and Villegas, Marshall Billingslea – a close ally of Venezuela’s opposition – took action. A former national security official in Republican administrations, Billingslea had for weeks been trolling Maduro. Now he brought Villegas into his cyberbullying.

FILE – President Nicolas Maduro flashes victory signs during Indigenous Day in Caracas, Venezuela, Oct 12, 2025. (AP Photo/Ariana Cubillos, File)

“Feliz cumpleanos ‘General’ Bitner!” he wrote in a mocking birthday wish on X the day Villegas turned 48.

Billingslea included side-by-side photographs that would be sure to raise eyebrows. One was the same one that Lopez had shared with Villegas the day before over WhatsApp, except the agent had been cropped out of it. The other was an official air force photo with a gold star denoting his new rank affixed to the shoulder epaulet.

The X post was published at 3:01 p.m. — a minute before another sanctioned Airbus that Maduro has been known to fly took off from Caracas’ airport. Twenty minutes later, the plane unexpectedly returned to the airport.

The birthday wish, seen by almost 3 million people, sent shockwaves across Venezuelan social media, as Maduro’s opponents speculated the pilot had been ordered to return to face interrogation. Others wondered if he would be jailed. Nobody saw or heard from Villegas for days. Then, on Sept. 24, the pilot resurfaced, in an air force flight suit, on a widely followed TV show hosted by Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello.

Cabello laughed off any suggestion that Venezuela’s military could be bought. As he praised Villegas’ loyalty, calling him an “unfailing, kick-ass patriot, ” the pilot stood by silently, raising a clenched fist in a display of his loyalty.

Contact AP’s global investigative team at Investigative@ap.org or https://www.ap.org/tips/

Associated Press writer Regina Garcia Cano contributed to this report from Caracas, Venezuela.

By LARRY NEUMEISTER, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump’s lawyers have asked a New York state appeals court to toss out his hush money criminal conviction, saying federal law preempts state law and there was no intent to commit a crime.

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The lawyers filed their written arguments with the state’s mid-level appeals court just before midnight Monday.

In June, the lawyers asked a federal appeals court to move the case to federal court, where the Republican president can challenge the conviction on presidential immunity grounds. The appeals court has not yet ruled.

Trump was convicted in May 2024 of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to conceal a hush money payment to adult film actor Stormy Daniels, whose affair allegations threatened to upend his 2016 presidential campaign. Trump denies her claim and said he did nothing wrong. It was the only one of the four criminal cases against him to go to trial.

Trump was sentenced in January to what’s known as an unconditional discharge, leaving his conviction on the books but sparing him jail, probation, a fine or other punishment.

Appearing by video at his sentencing, Trump called the case a “political witch hunt,” “a weaponization of government” and “an embarrassment to New York.”

The Manhattan district attorney’s office, which prosecuted the case, will have a chance to respond to the appeals arguments in court papers. A message seeking comment was left with the office on Tuesday.

At trial, prosecutors said Trump mislabeled payments to his then-lawyer Michael Cohen as legal fees to conceal that he was actually reimbursing the $130,000 that Cohen paid Daniels to keep her quiet in the final weeks of Trump’s successful 2016 presidential run.

At the time, Daniels was considering going public with a claim that she and the married Trump had a 2006 sexual encounter that Trump has consistently denied.

In their arguments to the New York state appeals court, Trump’s lawyers wrote that the prosecution of Trump was “the most politically charged prosecution in our Nation’s history.”

They said Trump was the victim of a Democrat district attorney in Manhattan who “concocted a purported felony by stacking time-barred misdemeanors under a convoluted legal theory” during a contentious presidential election in which Trump was the leading Republican candidate.

They wrote that federal law preempts the “misdemeanor-turned-felony charges” because the charges rely on an alleged violation of federal campaign regulations that states cannot and have never enforced.

They said the trial was also spoiled when prosecutors introduced official presidential acts that the Supreme Court has made clear cannot be used as evidence against a U.S. president.

“Beyond these fatal flaws, the evidence was clearly insufficient to convict,” the lawyers wrote.

The lawyers also attacked the conviction on the grounds that “pure, evidence-free speculation” was behind the effort by prosecutors to persuade jurors that Trump was thinking about the 2020 election when he allegedly decided to reimburse Cohen.

By PATRICK WHITTLE and JOHN HANNA, Associated Press

PORTLAND, Maine (AP) — Maine’s elections in recent years have been relatively free of problems, and verified cases of voter fraud are exceedingly rare.

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That’s not stopping Republicans from pushing for major changes in the way the state conducts its voting.

Maine is one of two states with election-related initiatives on the Nov. 4 ballot but is putting the most far-reaching measure before voters. In Texas, Republicans are asking voters to make clear in the state constitution that people who are not U.S. citizens are ineligible to vote.

Maine’s Question 1 centers on requiring voter ID, but is more sweeping in nature. The initiative, which has the backing of an influential conservative group in the state, also would limit the use of drop boxes to just one per municipality and create restrictions for absentee voting even as the practice has been growing in popularity.

Voters in both states will decide on the measures at a time when President Donald Trump continues to lie about widespread fraud leading to his loss in the 2020 presidential election and make unsubstantiated claims about future election-rigging, a strategy that has become routine during election years. Republicans in Congress and state legislatures have been pushing for proof of citizenship requirements to register and vote, but with only limited success.

Maine’s initiative would impose voter ID, restrict absentee voting

The Maine proposal seeks to require voters to produce a voter ID before casting a ballot, a provision that has been adopted in several other states, mostly those controlled by Republicans. In April, Wisconsin voters enshrined that state’s existing voter ID law into the state’s constitution.

Question 1 also would eliminate two days of absentee voting, prohibit requests for absentee ballots by phone or family members, end absentee voter status for seniors and people with disabilities, and limit the number of drop boxes, among other changes.

Absentee voting is popular in Maine, where Democrats control the Legislature and governor’s office and voters have elected a Republican and an independent as U.S. senators. Nearly half of voters there used absentee voting in the 2024 presidential election.

Gov. Janet Mills is one of many Democrats in the state speaking out against the proposed changes.

FILE – Democratic Gov. Janet Mills delivers her State of the State address, Jan. 30, 2024, at the State House in Augusta, Maine. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)

“Whether you vote in person or by absentee ballot, you can trust that your vote will be counted fairly,” Mills said. “But that fundamental right to vote is under attack from Question 1.”

Proponents of the voter ID push said it’s about shoring up election security.

“There’s been a lot of noise about what it would supposedly do, but here’s the simple truth: Question 1 is about securing Maine’s elections,” said Republican Rep. Laurel Libby, a proponent of the measure.

A key supporter of the ballot initiative is Dinner Table PAC, a conservative group in the state. Dinner Table launched Voter ID for ME, which has raised more than $600,000 to promote the initiative. The bulk of that money has come from the Republican State Leadership Committee, which advocates for Republican candidates and initiatives at the state level through the country. Save Absentee Voting, a Maine group that opposes the initiative, has raised more than $1.6 million, with the National Education Association as its top donor.

The campaigning for and against the initiative is playing out as the state and FBI are investigating how dozens of unmarked ballots meant to be used in this year’s election arrived inside a woman’s Amazon order. The secretary of state’s office says the blank ballots, still bundled and wrapped in plastic, will not be used in the election.

Texas voters consider a citizenship requirement

In Texas, voters are deciding whether to add wording to the state constitution that Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and other backers said would guarantee that noncitizens will not be able to vote in any elections there. State and federal laws already make it illegal for noncitizens to vote.

FILE – Texas Gov. Greg Abbott speaks to reporters outside the West Wing of the White House, Feb. 5, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

Thirteen states have made similar changes to their constitutions since North Dakota first did in 2018. Proposed constitutional amendments are on the November 2026 ballot in Kansas and South Dakota.

The measures have so far proven popular, winning approval with an average of 72% of the vote.

“I think it needs to sweep the nation,” said Republican state Rep. A.J. Louderback, who represents a district southwest of Houston. “I think we need to clean this mess up.”

Voters already have to attest they are U.S. citizens when they register, and voting by noncitizens, which is rare, is punishable as a felony and can lead to deportation.

Louderback and other supporters of such amendments point to policies in at least 20 communities across the country that allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, though none are in Texas. They include Oakland and San Francisco in California, where noncitizens can cast ballots in school board races if they have children in the public schools, the District of Columbia, and several towns in Maryland and Vermont.

Other states, including Kansas, have wording in their constitutions putting a citizenship requirement in affirmative terms: Any U.S. citizen over 18 is eligible to vote. In some states, amendments have rewritten the language to make it more of a prohibition: Only U.S. citizens are eligible to vote.

The article on voting in the Texas Constitution currently begins with a list of three “classes of persons not allowed to vote”: people under 18, convicted felons and those “who have been determined mentally incompetent by a court.” The Nov. 4 amendment would add a fourth, “persons who are not citizens of the United States.”

Critics say the proposed changes are unnecessary

Critics say the Maine voter ID requirement and Texas noncitizen prohibition are solutions in search of a problem and promote a longstanding conservative GOP narrative that noncitizen voting is a significant problem, when in fact it’s exceedingly rare.

FILE – A voter marks a ballot at the polling station in Kennebunk, Maine, March 5, 2024. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)

In Texas, the secretary of state’s office recently announced it had found the names of 2,700 “potential noncitizens” on its registration rolls out of the state’s nearly 18.5 million registered voters.

Veronikah Warms, staff attorney at the Texas Civil Rights Project, said pushing the narrative encourages discrimination and stokes fear of state retaliation among naturalized citizens and people of color. Her group works to protect the rights of those groups and immigrants and opposes the proposed amendment.

“It just doesn’t serve any purpose besides furthering the lie that noncitizens are trying to subvert our democratic process,” she said. “This is just furthering a harmful narrative that will make it scarier for people to actually exercise their constitutional right.”

In Maine, approval of Question 1 would most likely make voting more difficult overall, said Mark Brewer, chair of the University of Maine political science department. He added that claims of widespread voter fraud are unsupported by evidence.

“The data show that the more hoops and restrictions you put on voting, the harder it is to vote and the fewer people will vote,” he said.

Hanna reported from Topeka, Kansas.

By DAVID BILLER and SILVIA STELLACCI

ROME (AP) — The man who just took charge of Rome’s top tourist attraction wants to set the record straight: the Colosseum won’t be hosting any electronic dance music parties on his watch.

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Simone Quilici, director of the Archaeological Park of the Colosseum, shared his plan to bring concerts to the almost 2,000-year-old amphitheater in an interview with an Italian newspaper earlier this month, and social media proceeded to do what it all too often does. “Massive raves” were imminent, multiple accounts trumpeted alongside AI-generated images of multicolor light beams shooting from the arena into the heavens.

Quilici told The Associated Press that he heard complaints from archaeologists and ordinary Romans, dismayed their cultural heritage could be so desecrated. Even electronic music fans expressed concern online about the damage a whomping bass beat would inflict on an ancient structure that continues yielding new wonders, like the emperor’s secret passage that opens on Oct. 27.

Concerts must respect the Colosseum as a “sacred space,” Quilici said, as it is integral to Roman identity and has become imbued with religious significance. Today, it is the site of the Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) procession during Easter, traditionally presided over by the pope.

“The music must be carefully controlled. I mentioned certain artists — not by accident — who haven’t been ‘rock’ for some time, who play calm music and attract a calm audience, because the important thing is that it’s not a wild crowd,” Quilici, 55, said Friday in his first interview with foreign media since taking over on Oct. 20. “I joked about rock in moderation — that’s what I meant, a more subdued kind of music. But it was reported the opposite of what I said.”

Doors will open for Sting and gladiators

Concerts could be acoustic or jazz, he said, offering Sting as an example. The amphitheater could host poetry readings, dance performances and theater productions once the existing small platform is expanded. Also in the plans: historical reenactments of gladiatorial battles rooted in academic research.

“There are people who are extremely knowledgeable about daily life in past eras, with a remarkable level of scientific accuracy. So these activities are very welcome within the Colosseum park,” Quilici said. He stressed such presentations would be the antithesis of the shabbily costumed centurions who besiege the Colosseum by night, posing for photos with tourists and then harassing them for payment.

The Colosseum’s first concerts and performances will take place in no less than two years, he added.

Only a handful of concerts have taken place within the Colosseum over the years, including Ray Charles in 2002, Paul McCartney in 2003 and Andrea Bocelli in 2009. All were billed as special events and audience numbers were severely restricted.

“Unfortunately, as everyone knows, tourism is a commercial activity — an industry that does not always connect with culture,” he said on the Colosseum’s uppermost balcony. “Bringing cultural activities into the mix would enrich this place, making it not only a site to visit, but also a place where one can experience and enjoy artistic events.”

Looking beyond the Colosseum

Peering down into the arena’s ruins from high above, the bustle of tourists brings to mind the cross-section of an anthill. The Colosseum had almost 9 million visitors last year, up from 7 million the year before, according to data provided by the park.

Even in October, well outside the high tourist season of summer, the place was packed.

That’s partly due to the Vatican’s Jubilee year, held once every quarter-century, which continues to draw large tour groups of pilgrims. It’s also because the Colosseum is one of just two must-see spots for short-staying tourists, along with Vatican City, and “already is at maximum capacity,” Quilici said.

Therein lies the other great ambition for his tenure: inducing tourists to go elsewhere.

The park he oversees includes not just the Colosseum, but also other sites directly adjacent like the Roman Forum, which was the heart of the ancient city’s society, and Palatine Hill, where Rome was founded and the emperor’s palace is located.

Tickets lasting 24 hours include all three destinations. Still, one-third of buyers visit only the Colosseum, according to park data. If Rome’s an open-air museum, as is often said, that’s like catching a glimpse of Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa” through the crowd at the Louvre, then leaving without even looking at the other masterpieces in the room.

“Last year, tourists in Rome didn’t stay just two and a half days; their visits increased to four days. So there’s also the opportunity to use the Colosseum as a starting point for exploring less-visited places,” he said.

‘A courageous choice’

Likewise, relatively few visitors go to the nearby Circus Maximus, the sprawling grounds of Rome’s high-adrenaline chariot races, depicted in the 1959 film “Ben-Hur.” The Appian Way, known as “the queen of roads,” goes even more overlooked, despite becoming a UNESCO world heritage site last year. Its giant paving stones provide passage into a golden countryside that evokes long-gone centuries and provides welcome respite from Rome’s tourist-thronged center.

Both the Circus Maximus and the Appian Park, which Quilici administered before the Colosseum, are free to visit.

All these sites and more are near to one another, though somewhat disjointed – archaeological islands mostly separated by busy roads. Quilici hopes to create new access points to his park as well as connections with others to better manage the crowds and establish one consolidated area for exploration and discovery.

“It’s a collective effort, one that requires cooperation from all the different administrations,” he said. “However, it’s more a matter of management than of infrastructure costs. Choices that sometimes can be simple decisions like limiting traffic — not necessarily involving major expenses, but rather a courageous choice to restore life to the heart of the city of Rome.”