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New York (USA) – Ecco l’articolo pubblicato l’altro ieri sul New York Times, volutamente lo abbiamo lasciato in lingua originale. Buona lettura! - MELITO DI NAPOLI, Italy, May 29 — 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.
The New York Times
“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 — one of many trash-related protests that included, inevitably, mothers clutching rosaries on railroad tracks. 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, inequity in southern Italy and the local mafia, the Camorra.
But put simply, the bottom line seems the failure of politics, never a strong point here.
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 one politician or another. 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.”
The president’s office normally holds itself above daily politics. But in this case Mr. Napolitano, a courtly native of Naples, used his prestige to persuade the residents of one town — led by one devout and praying woman called La Passionaria di 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 out — and to lower tempers a little, too.
Already the center of Naples, amid worry about the risk to a tourist trade it depends heavily on, seems largely clean, and in the last few days, the 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 in the poorer south of Italy, especially in the peripheral neighborhoods of dingy high-rises already plagued by drugs and the Camorra.
On Tuesday in Scampia, one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods, drug dealers sat across the street from a Dumpster spilling over with construction debris and unidentifiable mushy rot.
“It’s never been like this — I can’t tell you why,” said Sabato D’Aria, 37, owner of a small grocery nearby.
Politicians, he said, only “talk, talk, talk, but in the end you see very little.”
“Unfortunately, here in the south we are always more penalized. Italy is divided.”
There is also the problem of the Camorra, which profits extraordinarily in the endless crisis over trash, much as arms dealers thrive in war. The Camorra controls many of the trucks and workers used to haul away trash. But it also operates illegal dumps used more in times of crisis — and far more harmful than legal ones to humans and the environment.
In theory, a permanent solution is not difficult, and has been proposed by an emergency commission: greater recycling and the opening of several incinerators and new dumping sites in Naples and the neighboring provinces. But as has happened in several of the identified towns over the last two weeks, local people protest loudly.
“The reaction is very strong,” said Marta di Gennaro, a deputy to Guido Bertolaso, the government’s “trash czar.” She called it “an exaggerated Nimby syndrome,” in which the “not in my backyard” protestors get disproportionately shrill media coverage.
And so, a dozen years after the crisis began, the only definite new waste site has been started in Acerra, just north of Naples — and residents there have been complaining too, perhaps with more reason than most. Three grey smokestacks for the region’s only incinerator, set to go on line in several months, rise from the town’s edge.
But a field across the road has also been used during the last few weeks as a temporary dump, whose smell and pickings attracts clouds of seagulls. Nearly every day, protesters have lain in the road to block garbage trucks. Trash was thrown in the mayor’s yard.
“Acerra shouldn’t die,” said one protester, Filippo Castaldo, an unemployed 50-year-old. “It should fight.”
So the question remains whether Naples is really ready to overcome its trash crisis, whether politicians can finally agree where new dumps and incinerators should be located. (Shipping garbage abroad does not seem to be an option: Romania, one of the few possibilities, recently said it would not take Italy’s trash.)
If difficult decisions are not made — and quickly — nearly everyone fears that trash will begin piling up again, with still more fires, anger and questions about how this can still happen in Europe.
There are many skeptics. Giorgio Lanzaro, a Naples city councilor in charge of the environment, noted how strong the protests had already been in communities where the trash might be stored only temporarily.
“I have some doubts whether this is over,” he said.
Peter Kiefer contributed reporting from Naples and Rome.
Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/31/world/europe/31naples.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
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