15 febbraio 2008

COSA SI DICE DELL'ITALIA NEL MONDO

OCCHIO ALLE PRIME PAGINE DEI GIORNALI ESTERI

Naples’ rubbish crisis benefits Berlusconi -FINANCIAL times

LA CRISI DI NAPOLI FAVORISCE BERLUSCONI(traduzione)

In Mire of Politics and the Mafia, Garbage Reigns NEW YORK TIMES

NEL MIRINO DELLA POLITICA E DELLA MAFIA,REGNI DELL'IMMONDIZIA ( traduzione)

MELITO DI NAPOLI, Italy, May 29 — Business at Pizzeria Napoli Nord is down 70 percent, and no one has the slightest doubt why: The reasons include eggshells, scuzzy teddy bears, garlic, hair that looks human, boxes for blood pressure medicine, moldy wine bottles — all in an unbroken heap of garbage, at places 6 feet high, stretching 100 or more yards along the curb to the pizzeria’s doorstep.
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The New York Times

“If you see all this trash, you don’t have much desire to eat,” said the owner, Vittorio Silvestri, 59, who, like most people in and around Naples these days, is very angry at his leaders.

For a dozen years, Naples and surrounding towns like this one have periodically choked on their refuse, but the last two weeks have flared into a real crisis, as much political as sanitary: trash began piling high in the streets as places to dump it officially filled up. Then, on Saturday, the last legal dump closed.

As the piles rose and the stench spread, 100 or more refuse fires burned some nights — one of many trash-related protests that included, inevitably, mothers clutching rosaries on railroad tracks. And while a patchwork of emergency measures has eased the crisis in the past few days, even the beleaguered men whose job it is to collect the trash sympathized.

“The people are right,” said Guido Lauria, in charge of sanitation for a large section of the city, including the Soccavo neighborhood, where his workers cleared away heaps of garbage. “You smell this. People have children, but animals come, then insects. And then they complain.”

The problems around Naples, a city long defined by both its loveliness and its squalor, are complicated, raising worries about tourism, inequity in southern Italy and the local mafia, the Camorra.

But put simply, the bottom line seems the failure of politics, never a strong point here.

As trash dumps filled over the years, it proved impossible to find new places or ways to get rid of garbage, largely because of local protests or protection by one politician or another. But years of postponing the problem finally caught up with Naples (and by bad luck just as the temperature rose, creating as much stink as unsightliness).

“This is a situation that is tied to the incapability of the political structure,” said Ermete Realacci, an environmental expert and member of Parliament for the center-left Daisy Party. Namely, he said, politicians of all stripes have been unwilling “to make strong choices” to build new dumps or incinerators.

And so, as the world’s news media fixed on trash fires burning in the streets, the nation’s president, Giorgio Napolitano, issued an unusual “extremely energetic appeal” to all levels of government and to politicians of the left, right and center finally to solve the crisis. At stake was not just public order, he said, but “the image of the country.”

The president’s office normally holds itself above daily politics. But in this case Mr. Napolitano, a courtly native of Naples, used his prestige to persuade the residents of one town — led by one devout and praying woman called La Passionaria di Parapoti — to allow a closed local dump to be reopened for a brief 20 days.

That, combined with several other temporary measures, is allowing Naples and the surrounding communities to finally begin digging out — and to lower tempers a little, too.

Already the center of Naples, amid worry about the risk to a tourist trade it depends heavily on, seems largely clean, and in the last few days, the sanitation department has clicked into an emergency mode that has cleared away an impressive amount of trash.

But the dumps are temporary, the fires have not stopped and much trash remains, compounding longstanding problems in the poorer south of Italy, especially in the peripheral neighborhoods of dingy high-rises already plagued by drugs and the Camorra.

On Tuesday in Scampia, one of the city’s most dangerous neighborhoods, drug dealers sat across the street from a Dumpster spilling over with construction debris and unidentifiable mushy rot.

“It’s never been like this — I can’t tell you why,” said Sabato D’Aria, 37, owner of a small grocery nearby.

Politicians, he said, only “talk, talk, talk, but in the end you see very little.”

“Unfortunately, here in the south we are always more penalized. Italy is divided.”

There is also the problem of the Camorra, which profits extraordinarily in the endless crisis over trash, much as arms dealers thrive in war.

( Traduzione parziale)

Il commercio al Pizzeria Napoli Nord è giù 70 per cento e nessuno ha il minimo dubbio del perchè: ........- tutte in un mucchio ininterrotto di immondizia, all'altezza di 6 piedi, lungo il bordo /gradino della porta del pizzeria.

“se vedete tutti questi rifiuti, non avete molto desiderio mangiare,„ ha detto il proprietario, Vittorio Silvestri, 59, in che, come la maggior parte della gente ed intorno a Napoli attualmente, è molto arrabbiato ai suoi capi.

Per i dozzina anni, Napoli e le città circostanti come questo si sono soffocate periodicamente sui loro rifiuti, ma le ultime due settimane si sono svasate in una crisi reale, tanto politica quanto sanitaria: hanno cominciato ad accatastare i rifiuti nelle vie, mentre i posti per farli uscire si sono riempiti . Allora, il sabato, l'ultimo deposito legale chiuso.

Poichè la rosa dei mucchi e la diffusione dello stench, 100 o più fuochi dei rifiuti ha bruciato determinate notti - una di molte proteste rifiuto-relative che hanno incluso, inevitabilmente, le madri che recitano il rosario sulle piste della ferrovia. E mentre una rappessentanza delle misure di emergenza ha facilitato la crisi nei giorni ultimi, persino gli uomini sono stanchi del duro lavoro .
GRAZIE CHE BELLA FIGURA

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