It is the stench that you notice first. Then, as you get closer, you see and smell the mountains of rubbish: coloured plastic bags, black dustbin liners, cardboard boxes sodden with overnight rain, a carpet of broken glass. Yesterday Italian troops from units more used to service in Iraq and the Balkans were called in to start clearing the festering piles of rubbish from the streets of Naples.

The city’s suburbs already resemble a warzone or an urban uprising. Access roads to the suburb of Pianura, the epicentre of the crisis, are closed off. Tough-looking young men in jeans and jackets patrol makeshift barricades made of overturned rubbish bins, corrugated iron and tyres to stop rubbish trucks getting through.

Occasionally, a member of this suburban rebel army lobs a powerful home-made firecracker into a bin, setting off a thunderous “boom” and a pall of smoke, adding to the haze from rubbish set on fire by desperate local residents. The barricade is lifted only to let ambulances and food supplies through.

“Where is our mayor?” asked Antonio, the owner of the nearby Café Napoli, his voice shaking with fury. “We have had this problem for 14 years, yet nothing has been done.

“The authorities clean up the centre of Naples for the tourists, but leave us in the suburbs to sink into this mess,” said Luigi, a pensioner.

The crisis has engulfed the centre, after the city’s landfills, long over-stretched, finally reached capacity over Christmas. Amidst claims that the Naples Mafia is sabotaging attempts to open new landfills, more than 110,000 tonnes of waste has been left festering on the streets.

At the port, where ferries and hydrofoils leave for Capri and Ischia, it has been cleared or organised into neat piles. But the sidestreets near the 18th-century San Carlo opera house and the Royal Palace are piled high with rotting and split bags. Overturned rubbish bins have blocked streets near the cathedral and even in the upmarket hilltop district of Vomero, overlooking the Bay of Naples.

Yesterday soldiers bulldozed rubbish from outside schools which have been closed because of health fears. Some refused to reopen, however, saying that children were safer at home.

“Naples is heading for collapse,” Il Mattino, the local paper, said. “We are submerged in rubbish.” All dumps in the Naples area are full and incinerators that have been allocated funds by the central and regional authorities have either not been finished or not built at all. Fraud investigations are focusing on the involvement of the Camorra, the Naples Mafia, which police say has made profits of millions of euros from the transport and illegal dumping of waste.

The Camorra is accused of sabotaging the incinerator projects, and of poisoning the environment through illegal landfills of untreated waste to the point where some forms of cancer in the Campania region are three times the national average.

Yesterday, thousands of protesters in Pianura clashed with police who were trying to reopen a landfill site that was closed a decade ago. At least three people were taken to hospital.

Romano Prodi, the Prime Minister, held an emergency summit with the ministers of defence, environment and health and said that the crisis was “damaging the image of Italy”. The EU has warned Italy that it faces heavy fines for infringing EU health and environmental directives.

Rosa Russo Jervolino, the Mayor of Naples, and Antonio Bassolino, the head of the Campania region, blamed the central Government in Rome for the crisis, and both have refused mounting calls for their resignation.

MOB RULE

— The Camorra, a less well-known counterpart to the Mafia, has influenced the life of Naples for more than 200 years

— After an earthquake devastated Naples in 1980, fake construction businesses controlled by the Camorra stole millions of pounds of construction funds

— It controls billions of pounds of drug imports to Europe, and counterfeits and smuggles cigarettes across the Continent

— A Camorra feud in 2004, started by junior bosses refusing to pay tribute to their elders, led to the deaths of 140 people

Sources: University of Kent; streetgangs.com

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