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Franco Origlia / Getty Images
A woman covers her face as she passes rubbish piled up in the central street on November 19, 2010 in Naples, Italy. Around 2,000 tons of rubbish have accumulated in various parts of the city over the past two weeks, resulting in violent confrontations between police and the residents of Terzigno, near Naples, who are demanding the closure of one open-air dump and have rejected a plan to open a second.
Ciro De Luca / Reuters
Pedestrians walk past a pile of garbage along a road in downtown Naples, November 19, 2010. The Italian government pledged 150 million euros ($ 209.6 million) on Thursday to help solve a chronic garbage crisis in and around Naples and said it would speed up the construction of incinerators in the region.
Franco Origlia / Getty Images
Rubbish is piled up in Corso Vittorio Emanuele with Mount Vesuvius in the distance on November 19, 2010 in Naples, Italy.
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I thought they said being Italian was the most fun you could have with your pants on!
Naples the gateway to the sewer.
Naples was my home port when I was in the Navy. It is a beautiful place except for the harbor waters which are filthy. They should take the trash out to one of the islands and burn it.
Now they will smell more like the French.
The women need to start shaving their legs and armpits. That might help.
I was in Naples 35 years ago and mainly remember it for being dirty and smelly. I've been in practically every other Italian city, even Salerno, but Naples was the dirtiest in my experience. Although Firenze was far from clean--despite the art I wouldn't go there again. I found Venice to be very, very clean on the streets, despite the smelly water.
They say between the yrs 20 and 65,no men of Naples work.
A sure sign of a failed society, is a society that fails to keep itself clean. How can the people that live there do this to themselves? I know that in my city, if the garbage trucks quit coming, we will take the garbage to the dump ourselves. For these people to just throw it on the side of the street is just plain sad.
They really are earthworms down there (the southern part) as they say.
Can you imagine the size and number of rats in those trash piles?
Why must people say immature things...If you want to debate, than have at it, but if intelligence is what you lack, stay on the playground. There are people who really do care to discuss things on an adult level.
Joe - are you a professional imbecile or just an amateur having some fun in the trailer park tonight?
No, the northern Italians call the southern Italians earthworms and then spit. I'm not making this up. They think they are trailer park imbeciles.
Well the solution is visible in the photograph of the trash bags with Mount Vesuvius in the background. Truck the garbage to the enormous open pit existing at the top of the volcano and discharge it. If, and when, it erupts again, the trash would be incinerated. Simple.
Throw it in the volcano! Yay!
The Naples garbage crisis is a symptom of weak environmental regulation in Italy. A lot of the waste, including hazardous waste from the north of Italy gets dumped in the south. Italy is a small country. It's not that Italians are incapable of dropping their trash off at the dump, the dumps are overflowing. Unlike the US, there is not a lot of land available to build new landfills to bury the waste.
Why don't they just build incinerators? The mafia controls waste management, and the locals know that incinerators would be built and run by companies controlled by the mob, and there would be no regulation of what gets burned. So the locals would have no protection from hazardous air pollutants from incineration. Local government is controlled by the mob, and those who protest are silenced.
This is not a problem caused by the ignorance of locals,it's caused by a lack of power against organized crime.
Every few years, Berlusconi makes a macho fuss about how he's going to solve the garbage crisis in Italy - but nothing changes.
Don't make fun of these people, they're living a nightmare. And no, shaving their legs has nothing to do with it.
For more on the lighter side of living in Italy, see 4initalia on wordpress.
Why doesn't Mt. Visuvius ever erupt when it is needed?
I was there just last week and I though it smelled normal. When you come in on a boat, you can smell it 6 miles out. I guess that just primes your nose for the main attraction.