Garbage Problems Trash Naples

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


And as the stench rose, 100 or more refuse fires burned some nights - one of many protests for various causes that also included, inevitably, mothers clutching rosaries on railroad tracks. Even the beleaguered men whose job it is to collect the trash sympathized.


"The people are right," said Guido Lauria, who is in charge of sanitation for a large section of the city, including the Soccavo neighborhood, where his workers cleared away heaps of garbage Wednesday morning. "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 squalor, are complicated, raising worries about tourism, ongoing inequity in poor southern Italy and the local mafia, the camorra.


But put simply, the bottom line seems the failure of politics, never a strong point in Italy.


As trash dumps filled up over the years, new places or ways to get rid of garbage were not found, largely because of local protests or protection by one politician or another. Years of postponing the problem finally caught up with Naples (and by bad luck just as the temperatures 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 the Italian 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 in any particular place.


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


The president's office normally holds itself above daily politics. But in this case, Napolitano, a courtly native of Naples, used his prestige to persuade the residents of one town - led by one devout and praying woman dubbed "la Passionaria of Parapoti" - to allow a closed local dump to be reopened for a brief 20 days.


That, combined with several other temporary measures, is allowing Naples and the surrounding communities to finally begin digging themselves out - and hopefully lower tempers here, too.


Already the center of Naples, amid worry about the risk to the tourist trade upon which it depends heavily, seemed largely clean, and in the last few days, the city's sanitation department has clicked into an emergency mode that has cleared away an impressive amount of trash.


But the dumps are temporary, the fires have not stopped and much trash remains, compounding longstanding problems, especially in the peripheral neighborhoods of southern Italy, where dingy high-rises already are plagued by drugs and the mafia.