So why are there tons of garbage bags on the streets of Naples, sometimes piled as high as the first floor of the buildings? How come it never happens in Genoa, Milan and Bologna, but in Naples it does? The answer actually exists and it is simple. The waste cycle in Campania is based on the unrestrained prevalence of landfills. Over time, however, these landfills fill up and the court sequesters them. They are closed because of capacity issues and other reasons: the leakage of leachate, the liquid created by rainwater seeping into the waste or by the waste’s decomposition. And so at some point the trucks can no longer dump into the landfills and the garbage remains on the streets. This generates hellish effects such as bonfires, which are lit to try to decrease the volume of garbage. There is one district in the Neapolitan area, the Giugliano–Villaricca–Qualiano triangle, which is now called the ‘land of fires’. You can often see dense black smoke billowing up along the roadsides. The procedure is well established: the most proficient at setting the fires are Romas, young immigrants. The clans give them fifty euros for every pile burned. They bind the waste with tapes from videocassettes, then toss on some alcohol and gasoline and move away. They set fire to the tape with a lighter, and the tape acts as a fuse. In a few seconds everything is burned: foundry by-products, glues and greasy fuel-oil deposits, which as they burn contaminate every inch of soil with dioxin.

The landfills are full for two major reasons. The first is that segregated garbage collection, which started late compared to other regions, doesn’t work; waste sorting is only done in a few districts in Naples (with excellent results, however). There is therefore a huge volume of garbage, which is simply allowed to accumulate and which over the years makes it necessary to find more and more landfills. From Chiaiano to Terzigno almost 84 per cent of the garbage is unsorted and ends up in landfills, whereas by law only 35 per cent should go there.

We Neapolitans represent a paradox, among other things, because Naples itself was the first city in Italy to have invented segregated garbage collection. In Ferdinand II of Bourbon’s 1832 Compilation of Laws and Decrees of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies we read that residents were required to keep the streets in front of their homes clean, ‘taking care to pile the garbage to the side of their homes, and to separate any shards of glass or crystal into a separate pile’. The punishment for those who did not comply with this law and did not separate their waste was severe, and could even lead to imprisonment.