With Naples’ rubbish dumps declared full at the end of last year, household waste piled up in the streets, forcing the government to appoint a “trash tsar” to take control of a crisis blamed on years of weak governance and organised crime.
More than halfway through his 120-day mandate, former national police chief Gianni De Gennaro has cleared the streets by sending trash to other parts of Italy and Europe, and dumping it into temporary storage until new landfills or incinerators are ready.
But sceptical locals dismiss the clean-up as a cosmetic exercise ahead of an April 13-14 general election, and hoteliers say it’s too little, too late; the damage to the city’s image has already been done.
“This crisis has been devastating,” said Sergio Maione, chief executive of three luxury hotels on the sea front.
“You’d have to go back to the time of cholera for something similar,” he said, referring to an outbreak of the water-borne disease which hit the city in 1973.
Maione’s Hotel Vesuvio - where a room overlooking the Bay of Naples costs �220 (about R2 700) in low season - closed one of its two restaurants, the renowned Caruso, as business dried up.
The hotel expects occupancy of no more than 30 percent this year compared with 50 percent in 2007 and a far cry from the fat years around 2002 when about 80 percent of its rooms were full.
The trash crisis compounded problems for Naples, which was already fighting a reputation of rampant street and mafia crime.
In one counter-measure to concerns over crime, the city gave away free plastic watches to tourists in the hope they leave their tempting Rolexes in the hotel safe.
Add to those problems a record high euro/dollar exchange rate and the result is clear, says Maione.
Empty
“The city is empty - there are no tourists.” The solution? “We need to get rid of the waste.”
Out on the streets, the few foreign visitors are surprised not to see the great mounds of rotting trash that piled up in the city centre just a few weeks before.
But while downtown Naples and the sea front are remarkably clean, stinking trash is still rotting on the outskirts and the countryside - poor areas left off most tourist itineraries.
“I saw a lot of garbage on the way from Rome to here,” said Tomoko Okura, a guide with a group of Japanese tourists waiting to board a ferry to the isle of Capri.
Her clients nodded in unison when asked if they had heard about Naples’ waste crisis before coming to Italy.
Also waiting to board the hydrofoil was Claudio Velardi, a public relations professional and former political adviser, appointed head of tourism last month by the centre-left regional administration which is also in charge of waste policy.
Velardi kicked off a charm offensive at a tourism fair in Germany at the end of last month, part of a global effort to counter Naples’ bad publicity from the waste crisis.
“We are doing an immediate communications campaign … to send a clear message that the information about Naples they have received over recent months is only partially true, if not to say completely wrong,” he told Reuters before heading for talks with Capri hoteliers.
Velardi conceded the clean-up might be viewed by some residents with scepticism.
“You have to start with the central areas and then expand out. That can seem a bit cynical for people who live in areas that have been suffering for many months, but we need to be practical and get a plan which proceeds day by day.”
amp,cholera,far cry
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