EURO TRASH

Travis Diehl

Creating a map of Italy through its waste disposal systems – on a tour from Rome to Pompeii, and Florence to Venice – leads to the question: what can we learn from what is left behind?

The banded steel trash cans stood stark in the near-empty square as I crossed the Piazza del Popolo. A translucent plastic bag hung empty in each one, purple in the flimsy dawn. The public bins of Rome are shaped like the amphorae that held wine and olive oil and other goods in ancient times, but made of loosely spaced horizontal bars to discourage bombs. They still bear the imperial sigil of Rome’s civic works: SPQR. A few kilometres to the south of the piazza rises Monte Testaccio, an artificial hill comprised almost entirely of amphorae, built up over centuries as the clay pots that carried olive oil from elsewhere in the empire arrived in Rome and were discarded. A coating of lime helped tamp down the odour of spoiling fat. 

My family was waiting on the other side of the square with the driver who would take us through the countryside to Pompeii. In Pompeii, said our guide, archaeologists have found evidence of systematic recycling of pottery and other debris, including using crushed terracotta in the cement footpaths. Household waste was either left in the street for the rains or public fountains to wash into the sewer (the Romans had refined plumbing and sewers) or stuffed in holes sunk into storerooms. Today, these bone-dry middens unveil crushed stashes of broken vessels, animal bones, charred wood and olive pits. 

My mother thought Rome would be as clean as it looks in movies; I could tell the grime was getting to her. Florence came closer to meeting her expectations. In Venice, garbage was front of mind, but managed, like the sewage-laced tides that periodically inundate the cafés. The range of trash-management solutions employed in the three cities we visited are a picture of modern Italy, if not Europe entire – an old land unevenly rising to the level of contemporary waste. 

To me, the half-litre bomber bottles of Peroni discarded on the low stone walls or the thin daybeds slumped against the signposts were not signs of decay or dysfunction but, on the contrary, the marks of a city full of people with better things to do than travel to the landfill. But any city would choke on its own refuse if it weren’t for small armies of trash collectors – feats of social engineering as impressive as the aqueducts that watered Rome from the hinterlands. One night, as we braced for a touristic meal at whatever nearby restaurant seemed least bad – wine! Bread! Pasta! More wine! – a trash truck pulled up near our table and lingered there, hooked the trattoria’s dumpster, exalting its fragrant load in mid-air, and slammed it back down like an empty bottle. The grim progress of the spazzini at work was reassuring, too. This was a city, after all. No purity! Only the cacophony of false gods and idols, none of them new.

The amphorae-shaped bins in Rome were introduced in 2020. They replaced a system of clear plastic bags hanging freely from rings, still in use on the outskirts, meant to be easy to collect and difficult to hide a bomb in. Seagulls and boars picked the bags to bits, and images of the capital ransacked by wild animals circulated in US media. But the problem runs deeper, to the closure of Rome’s main landfill in 2013 after it failed to meet new EU standards. In 2022, things weren’t much better. That summer, one of the city’s three remaining waste processing centres caught fire under suspicious circumstances. So did several junkyards, resulting in tangles of e-scooters, the baskets on their handlebars stuffed with trash, mixed with mounds of garbage propped next to storefronts and against parked vans.

Florence was a different story. They were serious about recycling, and the city in general seemed to generate little scrap, exuding a general air of aesthetic pride befitting a self-described artists’ city. The management of waste had outpaced the possibility of crisis. I would pass the duomo, Brunelleschi’s Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore, several times a day. The Airbnb I had rented was around the corner, just past an old Medici palazzo turned museum, its rusticated base studded like a fortress. Along the way were trash cans shaped like fluted columns, their openings mouthlike on their sides. The scaffolding raised around a portion of the cathedral’s facade was printed life size with an image of its green and black banded marble. To the left, the stone was darkened by city soot; to the right, it was bright and bold – the scaffolding worked around the cathedral’s skin like a lamprey.

Our second to last night in town, I cooked my family dinner at my fourth-floor apartment, a couple of big steaks in my best imitation of the Florentine style, the duomo in the background behind the Weber. Pasta with spring vegetables, fava beans shelled twice, several bottles of red. There was a lot of waste, too much for the cute set of bins for landfill, compost, recycling and glass tucked under the Ikea kitchen sink. But where were the dumpsters? The building itself had no obvious common area, like a German apartment block might. I had noticed, though, receptacles in neat rows of three or six or eight, standing in the street like small grey mailboxes. I’d assumed they were for litter, until one morning I witnessed a woman deposit two sackfuls of garbage into one’s maw. My sister-in-law solved the mystery. The trucks come in the early hours, reach out a red hydraulic arm, clip onto a bin by the cremini-shaped knob on its top and lift several square metres of dumpster out of the pavement. The arm ascends, pivots, a switch is pressed, a plunger depressed and the container’s bottom opens like a wet cardboard box, spilling into the truck. Then the crane returns the bin to its perfectly square hole, both bevelled where they meet for a flush fit. 

The public interface of an underground compost bin in Florence, with its F-90 mushroom mount, part of the Easy System by Nord Engineering.

This is the Easy System by Nord Engineering, an Italian company with contracts to manage waste for dozens of Italian cities, hundreds around Europe, and a handful more worldwide. The standardised F-90 “mushroom” mount allows a single operator to empty bins on either side of the street without exiting the truck’s cab. Steel dumpsters come in several formats, including underground, above-ground and custom-encased versions. Rats can’t get in (or out), odours are confined and people are said to bag their trash better when they have to carry it a couple of blocks to a collection point. The only downside, maybe, is that cities thus equipped also limit the opportunities for voyeurism a pile of trash can bring. The only Florentine haul I saw comprised a stack of cardboard, empty picture frames, an unremarkable steel carafe taking up space on an underground container’s galvanised top plate. What do Fiorentinos buy? What do they throw out? It started to rain, the trash inside stayed dry.

What will remain in the middens of Europe for the future to decode? When I leave the continent, when I go back to New York, does Europe continue to exist?

Pompeii, said our guide, wasn’t just destroyed, not simply entombed; it was erased and forgotten. The fertile ash that buried slaves alive and buckled the top floors of the port city’s houses and baths fed the quick growth of grasses and trees until only a meadow remained. Pompeii was rediscovered by accident. I thought of this on my Ryanair flight to London, in a seat with no seatback pocket for your litter, when I came across an article in the Economist about the first permanent nuclear-waste disposal sites nearing completion in Scandinavia. The basic design consists of a set of long, parallel tunnels, cut hundreds of metres underground, connecting a series of deep pits extending straight down into the bedrock. Remote-controlled cranes and robots do the dirty work. The spent fuel rods in their sarcophagi of iron and copper go into the pits, which are then filled in with bentonite. When the facility can hold no more the whole complex will be packed with earth and all the surface buildings wiped away. 

Scientists, artists, philosophers, semioticians and historians still argue over what sort of sign can convey a strong-enough warning, a forbidding worthy of nuclear waste, to people who might stumble across the lingering danger of a radioactive dump in as many as 100,000 years. A skull and crossbones? A field of giant thorns? An atomic-age Rosetta Stone, explaining the problem in a dozen modern languages and a series of pictographs? Any of these monuments could be misunderstood, and at any rate, reckless curiosity will likely still be human nature, whatever human comes to mean. No, they’ve decided, at least for now, that the best course is to pull back, destroy the lab, leave no trace and hope that chance will be enough to save our as-yet-unimaginable future. ◉

All photography by the author