The Shame of Naples

[Sifjar]

Living under the shadow of Vesuvius is said to influence the mindset of everyone under the shadow. I have been told Live today, for tomorrow we may all die! Does this give license to live anyway one wants? It sure seems to be the case here in 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.

Well makes me to think how lucky the Swedes are

[Marcus Marulus]

Allegedly, the reason for this situation is that citizens living in a quarter in which a new garbage dump was to be built, rebelled against the local authorities, because they want a golf-terrain to be built there instead of the dump.

[Sifjar]

Originally Posted by Marulus

Allegedly, the reason for this situation is that citizens living in a quarter in which a new garbage dump was to be built, rebelled against the local authorities, because they want a golf-terrain to be built there instead of the dump.

Looks like Africa

[Marcus Marulus]

Rifiuti, Prodi: «Vergogna per l\'ItaliaOgni Regione faccia il suo dovere» Corriere della Sera

La città di monnezza e bellezza sopravviverà a chi la giudica Corriere della Sera

EFFEDIEFFE Giornale on-line - Direttore Maurizio Blondet

EFFEDIEFFE Giornale on-line - Direttore Maurizio Blondet

[Kernunnos]

Originally Posted by Sifjar

Looks like Africa

It is worst.

Anything is organized.

Camorra controls politics and it doesn't want incinerators since they would spoil the camorra's business of illegal waste disposal.


Milan has 2200 street cleaners, Naples 22000. The milanese ones work, the neapolitans don't , their stipend is a political favor they repay with voting thievish politicians.

Any public office in southern Italy is bloated, Calabria has 30.000 forest workers, four times that of the North: fires blaze there in summer, often the result of arson by the same "guards".

They are mostly connected to mafia (ndrangheta) and again they do political favors, often acting also as true criminals.

Public health service in southern Italy costs the state twice as ours, they give less than half of our efficiency: so many southern italians come here to find decent cures, aggravating our costs.


Recently it was discovered that an entire urban police department in Naples was staffed with camorristi.


It is a world apart, where civil servants would quadruplicate often their income by the most fantastic legal tricks: when discovered, they don't even blush, just like local politicians do not when caught stealing.

Tax evasion is 10 percent in the north and 90 percent in Calabria

Etc etc etc ... old story.

Either it is amputation or it will ever be this farces going on daily.