Like the many Neapolitans who have had enough of being constantly described as overflowing with trash, hurt by seeing their city covered with garbage. ‘Because we believed Berlusconi, and now how do we get out of it?’ ‘I knew the garbage would come back and that Berlusconi hadn’t solved anything. That’s politics.’ Those are the first two comments (their simplicity makes me smile) made by a listener who calls in to a local radio station which gives Neapolitans a chance to vent their outrage after an avalanche of refuse has once again, for the umpteenth time, inundated the streets of the city. Everything, periodically, goes back to the way it was before. But in Naples, almost as if to ward off bad luck, you can no longer talk about the waste crisis and you should not even mention the so-called ‘land of fires’ of which I wrote in my first book, Gomorrah – that triangle of land poisoned by decades of illegal and dangerous waste traffic and never reclaimed. Every now and then the city centre goes back to stinking like a garbage dump, the streets are lined with trash again, the population continues to protest against the opening of new landfills, alarmed that they might attract not only lawful refuse but also illegal waste, as Campania’s landfills have always done. Sometimes they’re lucky enough, when nothing happens in the world to monopolize attention, and the news is heard; at other times there’s a hurricane, a plane crash, a flood, or a sex scandal, and the protests are passed over in silence. They try to say that the soil is safe, that only a small amount of it is polluted, but waste continues to burn, the air in these areas is almost unbreathable, people die of cancer and no answer seems to be due. Governments change, but they keep on telling us: ‘You see? Everything is fine, the citizens’ committees that were protesting earlier have realized that the landfills are harmless and necessary.’ False. But after years of sticking-plaster solutions that have done nothing to solve the problem, this enormous sham is sometimes exposed, sometimes not, and it’s the region and the people’s health that pay the price. Landfills are overflowing because they’ve been filled, in recent decades, with all types of waste from outside the region. But if you report this you get an immediate, violent reaction from the mayors of the municipalities you mention: those from which the toxic wastes came and those in which the wastes were spilled, entombed, buried or hidden. All threatening lawsuits simply because you stated that those areas are toxic-waste trafficking zones. The Camorra continues to profit in all of this, while the lack of solidarity on the part of some regions of the North – which refused to accept Campania’s waste when needed so that the cycle might be normalized – has proved to be once again a short-sighted, perhaps unwitting, gift to the clans.