Italians raising a stink over garbage

MELITO DI NAPOLI, Italy — Business at Pizzeria Napoli Nord is down 70 percent, and no one has the slightest doubt why: The reasons include eggshells, scuzzy teddy bears, garlic, hair that looks human, boxes for blood pressure medicine, moldy wine bottles — all in an unbroken heap of garbage, at places 6 feet high, stretching 100 or more yards along the curb to the pizzeria's doorstep.

"If you see all this trash, you don't have much desire to eat," said the owner, Vittorio Silvestri, 59, who, like most people in and around Naples these days, is very angry at his leaders.

For a dozen years, Naples and surrounding towns like this one have periodically choked on their refuse, but the last two weeks have flared into a real crisis, as much political as sanitary: trash began piling high in the streets as places to dump it officially filled up. Then, on Saturday, the last legal dump closed.

As the piles rose and the stench spread, 100 or more refuse fires burned some nights. And while a patchwork of emergency measures has eased the crisis in the past few days, even the beleaguered men whose job it is to collect the trash sympathized.

"The people are right," said Guido Lauria, in charge of sanitation for a large section of the city, including the Soccavo neighborhood, where his workers cleared away heaps of garbage. "You smell this. People have children, but animals come, then insects. And then they complain."

The problems around Naples, a city long defined by both its loveliness and its squalor, are complicated, raising worries about tourism, ongoing inequity in southern Italy and the local mafia, the Camorra.

The bottom line seems the failure of politics, never a strong point.

As trash dumps filled over the years, it proved impossible to find new places or ways to get rid of garbage, largely because of local protests or protection by politicians. But years of postponing the problem finally caught up with Naples (and by bad luck just as the temperature rose, creating as much stink as unsightliness).

"This is a situation that is tied to the incapability of the political structure," said Ermete Realacci, an environmental expert and member of Parliament for the center-left Daisy Party. Namely, he said, politicians of all stripes have been unwilling "to make strong choices" to build new dumps or incinerators.

And so, as the world's news media fixed on trash fires burning in the streets, the nation's president, Giorgio Napolitano, issued an unusual "extremely energetic appeal" to all levels of government and to politicians of the left, right and center finally to solve the crisis. At stake was not just public order, he said, but "the image of the country."

Comments