This article focuses on recent “socio-sanitary developments” in the south of Italy that are “improving” the lives of residents.
At about 5.30 am each morning, the city council where we live sends out a trained team of employees to wake everyone up, just in case we can’t manage it ourselves. As an extra service they sometimes take the rubbish away as well, in tiny three-wheeled contraptions that are, from what I have seen so far, the backbone of Italian industrial might.
I’ve often in fact wondered why these exotic machines have not been introduced into other nations’ economies. (We shall call them took-took-clatters, because they took-took and clatter along the lanes). Their capacity is astonishing when you consider they can carry near enough a ton of cargo in a structure that is little more than a motorised wheelbarrow, as author of Italian Neighbours Tim Parks once described them . They can often be seen with an old bath tub in the back, in which two or three workmen are furiously mixing cement. Or leaning over menacingly with the contents of a small warehouse stacked up in an unlikely pile fully contemptuous of gravity.
The illustrious industrial might of Italy apart however, there can be no other machine in the history of mankind’s meddlesome tinkering with the internal combustion engine that can make more noise – even when switched off, dismantled, piled up in small heaps and scattered around the solar system one imagines – or that can encourage such loud shouting from its operators, than one of these iniquitous abominations. If you’ve ever wondered whether there exists a machine solely for the production of noise, well, this is it. The fact that it can also be used to collect rubbish and carry things in is but a fiendish accident of design (a “spandrel” as the late evolutionary biologist Steven Jay Gould might have called it).
If you drive a took-took clatter along the narrow vicoli of the old historical quarters of Italian towns, it is as if the entire noise production of a very noisy steel foundry (bottled over a conservative period of 100 years), has just been released beneath your window, all in the space of about 40 seconds. That’s about the time it takes the little hydraulic crane on the back of this monstrous contraption to attempt to grab, hoist and then spill the contents of the bins all over the cobbled stones.
After the rubbish is collected (or rather, strewn) over the lanes in this way you could, if you are so inclined, follow the trail of cans and bottles and potato peel to where the somewhat larger “command ship” rubbish cart stands waiting, and then watch as almost none of the rubbish that made it from the various collection points in the narrow lanes is carefully tipped.
I have on occasion done that, and I must confess that all one can do while beholding such activity is to marvel. Yet the real nuisance is not the rubbish, but the noise. Noise, lots of it, is what lubricates Italian civil life. It is a national right to make noise in Italy, just like voting or breathing, and everyone always makes sure they use it to the full.
That’s why it’s bemusing to note the introduction of a strange new breed of rubbish bin into southern Italian cities. Strolling past what looked like an ordinary municipal rubbish bin one day, I was privileged to be given a glimpse into the mind of apparently progressive Italian civil planners. A signora, carrying several rubbish filled supermarket carrier bags (without which none of us could live and society would never function) was opening the cavernous mouth of the bin by stepping on a lever with her foot (most ingenious i thought). I instinctively braced myself for the loud clatter that the lid was about to make as it slammed shut, breathing out as it did all sorts of evil odours and fragrances. But instead the lid continued to hang open after she’d deftly hurled the bags in, oscillating silently a few centimetres about its position.
It was one of those moments where the volume is suddenly turned down and everything conveniently becomes still in the background, so that you can concentrate on what’s going on in the main scene. The light itself became blurred and a haze shrouded the rubbish bin, where a busy formation of flies buzzed extra special slow just to add to the effect. Even the signora’s dress waved in slow motion through the thickened air as she walked away back to her door. And even when she had reached the doorway and her foot was on the first step, still no sound had come from the bin. Yet ever so gradually, and almost imperceptibly, the lid was surely and firmly coming down. As I gazed, sudden realisation came: not only had some thoughtful genius invented the silent closing rubbish bin, a deranged local council official had actually bought and installed one into a city whose rubbish collectors regularly wake the dead.
But I continued to watch, certain that the lid would reach a certain angle and then collapse catastrophically shut. Not a chance. To my complete annoyance it continued to descend quietly, discharging itself exponentially until closed. And as god and the signora are witness, no more than a clack came from it.
It is one thing to risk being arrested, say, if you are stalking someone, but it is another thing being caught loitering around a rubbish bin, and in the end i strolled on. But this was in 1999, and up until then my experience of Italian municipal rubbish bins was that the lid would near well take your arm off as it came down if you were not careful, not to mention battering your eardrums and breathing foul odours in your face. I confess I had never seen anything like it before – complete with little hydraulic dampers such as you find on the rear door of a family hatchback to stop it from slamming.
But now it seems that irreversible change is upon Italy, because in 2008 nearly all the bins come with this damping mechanism installed. It is but a matter of time before even the post office will start actually stocking stamps, i fear, and the newsagent will stop selling sweets by way of pretending they don’t have any small change. This vivacious, complex and above all noisy people are going the way of the fussy races of the Considerate Nations to the north, and who knows what this will do to Italian life.