Three days in Naples usually grants you an experience hardly definable other than ‘great’: the charming breath of a past European capital hits you with its magnificent palaces, breathtaking views, irrational toponymy and intense decay. How not to mention the food. Even me, kind of post-anorexic-modelish-weight-obsessed-milanese-guy, I am simply overwhelmed by the eclectic chain of wonderful tastes continuously offered. Pure food lust prevails over usual inappetence, eating becomes a moment you’re eager to see arriving – and you actually keep on doing. You get somehow used even to what you once thought intolerable – and even manage to like it: the local accent (that of course they proudly identify as a per se idiom) and the chaotic traffic (that you need to courageously face by keeping on moving – wherever – unless you want to get furiously horned by the entire vicinity at once).
And again, eating. With the eyes. With the mouth. With the nose, a bit less. Being in Naples in these days shows also, in fact, something not in the ‘common imaginary’ – not at least until a year ago or so. The whole world has talked enough already about ‘the problem’ of Naples and its suburbs. Submerged by rubbish. Suffocated by its own garbage.
At a closer look, the show reminds a plot of desperate drama, hyper-titanized worries, factious news and few – very few – reasonable voices. Joining ‘the few’, in the attempt to propose a ‘normalizing view’, I was then seriously slapped by realizing that to restore the real normality back over here, extra-ordinary measures need to be taken this time. Measures that, of the kind of reasonability I came pompously with, have almost nothing in common.
When talking about big cities, common experience tells us that usually there is at least an area where is ‘better not to go’. The absence of it unequivocally makes the distinction between a proper city and a village (or a countryside town, at the most). This is an area you are supposed to know by yourself you shall not free the ‘little adventurous’ that lives in you, thanks to your (hopefully) innate instinct of survival.
In the best cases such an area would be just one, lingering behind a discreet warn coming by close friends or caring hotel concierges when visiting (e.g. Geneva). More commonly, there are at least a couple and they would be reported in tourist guides, branded as ‘potentially dangerous sites’ (e.g. part of NYC’s Harlem district). In the worst cases, those are areas where the State has withdrawn, renouncing to a piece of its territory with the apparent scope to ghettoize the rejections of society and safeguard the others wherever else (sticking with New York City, what has been the almost entire neighborhood of the Bronx for the last six decades or so). Kind of open-air wide-tolerance areas, where (almost) anything is accepted to happen – within its borders and among its ‘components’.
The key-element for the ‘social acceptance’ of these areas is normally one: they have to be small, mostly secluded and sometimes the government should put in at least some fake-try to recover some pieces of it. Sometimes, too, some artist would go living there, eventually become amazingly famous and very possibly die soon afterwards.
With Naples, such key-element is basically reversed. In fact, without considering the waste mismanagement, as a rule the 2/3rds of the city are off-limits for the normal citizen, a figure that could be raised to 4/5ths for the average tourist. Mid-and-upper-bourgeoisies are trenched between a couple of streets and squares in the center and Posillipo*, these areas connected by the promenade avenue – of course congested even at 1am.
Thus, between those areas you can’t go because it’s ‘better not to go’ and those others you’d better not to go because they are invaded by rubbish or shrunk in traffic, there’s not that plenty of space to live in.

On the rubbish side, my local friends keep telling me that ‘it has never been like this’. In their experience, the historical (read: touristic) areas of the city have always been safeguarded at least in their appearance. Rubbish was maybe dropped off a couple of hundred meters away, but ‘the core’ had to stay clean – replicating a kind of Neapolitans’ concept of living that applies to everything: to always show much more and much better than you can actually do. Even if you’re just a muddled trump. Actually, the more you are and the more you tend to show off, in a vicious circle that usually sees broken guys ostentatiously offering dinner for forty people just before vanishing from circulation. Though, this is off the today-topic.
Well, here I am in ‘the core’, at the cross between via Filangeri and via Chiaia. All I can see – and I am not a hygienic-maniac – does definitely not remind a clean scenario: garbage is overflowing trashes almost everywhere, and at the end of both the streets colorful mounds remind to everyone how bad non-diversified trash can smell.
Besides the cleaning, what keeps my mind mumbling is the tie between such distasteful situation and the above ‘better not to go’ areas. By one side, the obvious consideration that to allow criminal organizations to manage and eradicate in whole pieces of the city or in the entirety of the suburbs does not seem a recipe that could produce anything good. By the other, discovering the way these organizations maintain consensus over their crowds has been somewhat shocking.
In fact, being the waste (mis)management a hugely profitable sector for these criminal groups (receiving contributes and reimbursements for the waste disposal – which is of course not done, being trash merely unloaded somewhere else in ‘patrolled’ countryside), they simply react to the State’s awakening over the topic just by proposing a more tempting alternative.
The State offers the construction of incinerators which will be finished who knows when and where you perhaps will have a work paid just a bit more than a misery per month? Look, here’s a 100: would you please …