Other Romans said that the city had missed an important opportunity to re-establish a substantial connection to the Tiber, once central to the Italian capital’s identity but today mostly neglected and overlooked.

“The operation was badly done,” said Giuseppe Maria Amendola, the president of the Consorzio Tiberina, an association that aims to promote the Tiber. As designed, the spartan beach could have been plunked down anywhere, even in a parking lot, because “it gives nothing to the Tiber,” he said.

“This is not the way the city should be thinking about revamping the river,” he added.

According to legend, Rome was established on the banks of the Tiber, where Romulus and Remus, the city’s mythical twin founders, were rescued and suckled by a wolf. Tall travertine embankments were built along stretches of the Tiber after disastrous flooding in 1870, effectively separating the city from the river, but for centuries before, Romans had direct access to the river and the ports that dotted its banks.

Until a few decades ago, Romans did not disdain dipping or even plunging into the Tiber during hot summer days. The city’s riverfront bathing establishments also served as the backdrop to beloved Italian movies like “Poveri Ma Belli,” which detailed the dreams of postwar society. Coincidentally, a scene in the 1975 movie “Fantozzi” was filmed on the site of Tiberis beach, which even then was a desolate wasteland.

Silvio Parrello, a protagonist of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s provocative first novel, “Ragazzi di Vita,” recalled swimming in the Tiber in front of what is today the Tiberis beach in the mid-1950s, when the neighborhood was still a patchwork of gardens and vineyards. Pasolini himself said he would visit that area of the river, diving from the pylons of an adjacent bridge “with the older boys.” He captured those moments in his 1961 film “Accattone.” “I want to die wearing all my gold, like the pharaohs,” the title character says before diving into the Tiber.

“Romans may not engage with the river, but it has a strong presence in cinema; it has always had one,” said Angela Ermes Cannizzaro, the president of La Scatola Chiara, a nonprofit that last year organized walking tours of film locations along the Tiber during Rome’s annual film festival.

In recent years, restaurants, bars and concession stands have become summer staples along the Tiber’s downtown banks, drawing residents and tourists. But city administrations have struggled to find long-term solutions to the river’s neglect.