ORTA DI ATELLA, Italy (CN) — The Romans called the green plains of Naples campania felix — the happy countryside. Today, though, it's notoriously known as the Terra dei Fuochi — the Land of Fires — because of the noxious and criminal burning of trash and toxic waste that’s come to define this once-beautiful countryside of vineyards, orchards and gardens.
The environmental mess taking place here goes well beyond illegal trash fires. Criminal groups associated with Naples’ version of the Mafia — the camorra — ran lucrative operations in which they illegally buried toxic industrial waste.
Add to that a more general crisis of dealing with waste from the millions of people who live in and around Naples, Italy's second most populous city. Add to that truckloads of trash illegally discarded by unscrupulous and black market businesses wanting to avoid landfill fees and detection by tax authorities.
The result: Trash festers on the sides of roads, along country lanes, in fields and abandoned buildings.
Government is complicit. Across this region, local authorities designated spots as temporary trash depots, but the trash is still there, rotting in place years later. Add to this poorly managed urban sprawl and another common problem in Italy: illegal construction, known as abusivismo, a word denoting abusive behavior. The result: More waste
Waste is one of Italy’s most glaring and alarming environmental problems, affecting small towns and cities alike up and down the peninsula even though the country has one of the highest rates of recycling in the world.
It's here in the countryside of Campania where the seriousness of Italy's waste problem is stunning and horribly plain to see. Campania has become emblematic of an Italy drowning in waste, exacerbated by what's become known as the ecomafia — criminal groups that profit from environmental problems, including waste disposal.
“It's an embarrassment for me,” said Raffaele De Rosa, a 54-year-old businessman in Gugliano, a town like many others that has been swallowed up by Naples.
Riding on a scooter, he led a Courthouse News reporter to an infamous site where trash from Naples was supposed to be temporarily stored between 1998 and 2005. Fifteen years later, mounds of trash remain on the site’s 320 acres. The garbage has been baled and sits covered, watched over by guards.
“They were supposed to get rid of it but they did not do anything,” he said with disgust.
“It's huge — it's immense,” he said, waving his hands at the enormous site. He accused criminal groups of profiting from the inaction over removing the trash from this spot, known as the Taverna del Re.
Worried about contamination leaching into the surrounding fields, he pointed to an adjacent field where tomatoes were growing under a hot summer sun.
“Look here — they're growing fruit,” De Rosa said. “And this ends up on our tables. That's the problem.”
The Italian government has made cleaning up the Terra dei Fuochi a priority, but progress is slow even though large sums are spent on remediation and enforcement.
In Orta di Atella (the Garden of Atella) lives Vincenzo Tosti, a 61-year-old man who leads campaigns to clean up the Terra dei Fuochi as part of a network called Stop Biocidio. His town too is being swallowed up by the growing metropolis of Naples.