By Barbie Nadeau

What does it take to get someone to clean the stinking streets of Naples? This week, what it took was a visit from Italy's new-old prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. True to his pre-election promises, Berlusconi held his first cabinet meeting in his nation's most troubled city. Thanks to an ongoing garbage crisis, the trash has gone uncollected in parts of this city, raising tensions both locally and as far afield as the European Union headquarters in Brussels. Four days before Berlusconi's arrival, angry residents again took matters into their own hands and burned the garbage themselves. But city authorities did their bit too: on the eve of the cabinet meeting, they cleaned the streets in the historic center and along Berlusconi's route into the city. Elsewhere, the city remained buried.

Berlusconi has promised to deal with the crisis. At a press conference after the meeting, he pledged to turn landfills and incinerators in the region around Naples into military zones, protected by armed guards to keep protestors and the Neapolitan Camorra out. He appointed a new trash tsar, the head of the civil protection authority who is tasked to tackle the crisis "as if we are dealing with the aftermath of an earthquake or volcanic eruption".   He also promised to restart work on an incinerator that has been halted pending investigation for Mafia collusion. And he says he can clean up the streets of Naples and surrounding cities within a few months by using a handful of temporary landfills to be kept secret to avoid protests. To combat Neapolitans' "not in my backyard" mentality, he says anyone caught organizing protests to block waste removal will face up to five years in jail.