Rubbish Crisis at Pianura

Friday, 22 February 2008

Garbage, disease and road blocks are reminiscent of cholera emergency. Regional authority approved “declaration of urgency” and law for waste disposal facilities

The stinking depths of Campania’s rubbish dumps continue to produce surprises, as well as toxic waste. One such revelation is the elderly regional law that backdates the rubbish crisis to 1973, fully thirty-five years ago.

Can you guess what prompted the law? Cholera and protests at Pianura. This is proof – if proof were needed – that Italy has a shorter memory than the celebrated Collegno amnesiac. It’s easy enough to explain how long thirty-five years is.

For example, it only took Genghis Khan twenty-one to unify the Mongol tribes, conquer Asia, penetrate the Balkans and found the largest empire in history. It only took Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who died at thirty-five, twenty-seven years to write twenty-two operas, twelve sacred works, seventeen symphonies and numberless other concertos, sonatas and duets. Pius IX needed just thirty-two years to establish the longest pontificate after St Peter’s. In that far-off 1973, Julius Evola and Aldo Palazzeschi were still alive, Beppe Savoldi was the top goalscorer ahead of Paolino Pulici, Peppini Di Capri won the Sanremo song festival and cholera struck Naples.

The torrid month of August was drawing to a close. Prime minister Mariano Rumor had announced that the problems of southern Italy were at the top of his agenda, shellfish were suffocating to death on legal and unlicensed mussel farms and Naples had yet to recover from the energy crisis-inspired rage that in mid July had prompted bakers to pull down the shutters and customers to lay siege to their shops. When the first two cholera deaths were reported, there was panic. By 30 August, seven people had died and more than one hundred and fifty had been hospitalised.

The Americans started vaccinating residents with alarmingly large syringes. Anti-Christian Democrats smiled when the World Health Organisation said the epidemic was caused by the “Ogawa” serotype of Vibrio cholerae, setting up easy puns on the surname of leading local politician of the day, Antonio Gava, who was dubbed “’o Gava”. Meanwhile, protest spread in and around Naples as street fighting broke out in the streets, fires were started and chemist’s shops were looted.

Finally, the first health measures were put in place. There was a ban on the sale of shellfish, bathing was forbidden along the entire coast and dumping refuse in the streets was outlawed. Newspapers remembered past crises and published accounts of the dreadful cholera epidemic in 1884, which claimed seven thousand victims, and the even worse one that had left eighteen thousand dead in 1836-37. The health minister, Luigi Gui, said on arriving in Naples that he had found out what was going on from the radio and when the president of Italy, Giovanni Leone, visited the sick at the Cotugno hospital, a crowd of onlookers, as Eugenio Lucrezi would relate in Il Diario three decades later, watched from the sea front as “hundreds of kilos of unclaimed mussels, somehow torn loose from their supports, drifted free in the currents at Mergellina” while photographers immortalised dead rats floating in the shellfish farms.

Il Mattino newspaper republished the feisty open letter that the great Matilde Serao wrote in 1884 to the prime minister, Agostino Depretis: “Have you been along all of the Strada dei Mercanti? It must be four metres wide, which means carriages cannot get through, and it twists and turns like a length of gut. Its very tall houses shroud it in an ash-pale half-light on even the sunniest days. The stream in the middle of the road is black, putrid and clogged with mud, a stinking, putrescent mixture of lye, filthy soap suds and water from cooking macaroni or making soup. There are all sorts on the Strada dei Mercanti, one of the thoroughfares of the harbour district: murky shops where flitting shadows sell everything and anything, pawn shops, lottery shops and every so often a dark doorway, a muddy alley, a fryer reeking of rancid oil or a grocer’s shop filled with the stench of fermenting cheese and stale lard”.

Everyone complained that nothing had changed: the time had come to do something. This was the atmosphere in which people took to the streets to protest at the rubbish dumps, including the one at Pianura, where angry protesters set up road blocks just as they have today. In the wake of the disturbances, the Campania regional council, on whose Communist benches sat the young Antonio Bassolino, voted a “declaration of emergency”. It also passed a law, number 23 dated 19 November 1973, whose title sounds almost unreal today: “Regional finance for the construction, expansion and completion of facilities for the disposal of solid urban refuse”. As Mario Simeone, the head of the regional council’s press office at the time, recalls, the law was more than just an expression of good intentions.

There was an allocation of thirty billion lire for its implementation, funds that municipalities or their consortia should have used to “build the necessary incinerators in the framework of a regional five-year plan for the rational localisation of the facilities”. The resolutely phrased article nine threatens: “Should municipalities or consortia fail to present working plans or complete the works within the prescribed time, the regional authority will take direct measures to complete the facilities”. It was time to get down to work. But when the situation was reviewed five years later, not a single lira had been invested seriously. Since then, emergency has followed emergency and the country has had five presidents, nine legislatures and twenty-nine governments. The law might as well never have been passed: on each occasion, Campania has started again from scratch.

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