 main index © Jeff Matthews 2002-2012 entry May 2010
the Naples
sewerage system
Me & the Grand Poo-Bah of Cuma
Like most good surface dwellers,
I have no interest in my business once it leaves the
porcelain. I trust in the robots and human Warlocks
down below to carry it all peacefully to the sea,
where omnipotent Mother Nature will take care of it,
as overworked as that poor woman seems to be.
(Currently, she is helping out British Petroleum.) This, then, is about the Naples
sewers: the woes and triumphs and very difficult
task of clearing this large metropolitan area of
human waste. Until the unification of Italy in
1861, Naples had a system that was generally as
adequate as that of most cities of comparable size
in Europe (c. 500,000). We should remember, however,
that in spite of accounts of running water and flush
systems even in parts of the ancient world, what we
commonly call "modern plumbing" did not exist in
cities in Europe or America until the mid-to-late
19th century. Cities that had no sewers relied on
rain to wash away sewage. If the city was near a
river or the sea, that helped. In many cases,
however, waste water ran down the
streets and eventually drained as runoff into the
local watershed, a disaster when you think that
cholera and typhoid are water-borne diseases. The sewerage
system in the Naples of the 1860s was the one put
in place by the previous, pre-unity government,
the Bourbon rulers of the Kingdom of the Two
Sicilies. It was a "mixed" system of 54 collectors
totaling 180 km in length set at various points in the city.
("Mixed" means that the lines carried both waste
and rain run-off, unlike modern systems, which now
segregate the two.) The collectors channeled
sewage down to the shoreline of the city and out
to sea, where it was dispersed. In those days,
sewage was channeled into the sea untreated.
(Chemical treatment plants came in around 1900 in
most places). Fresh water is
essential, of course, and even before the modern
aqueduct system, Naples usually had a good supply.
The aquifer beneath the city is abundant, and even
the old aqueduct system was good. (A new aqueduct, the Serino, was built in
1881-85. There is a
separate entry on the
aqueduct.) Most large dwellings were
directly tapped into the aqueduct through a vast
series of underground
chambers and even the poorer classes had
access to wells and fountains from which to draw
water. Yet, the great deficiency of the sewerage
system in Naples at that time was its inability to
deal with overcrowding in the so-called bassi, the
low areas of town. Between
1873 and 1883 there were studies of the extremely
precarious conditions of public hygiene in the
city. Cholera broke out in 1884 (Axel Munthe's
personal account of the epidemic is here). It was frightful
and was the proximate cause of the decision by the
Italian government to tear down large portions of
the city and rebuild them. That project was called
the Risanamento. It lasted 25
years and included designing and building a new
sewerage system. Work began in 1889. The basic plan was: —Free the local city shoreline from sewage and channel it into a single collection (affluent) line that would start at Piedigrotta in the western part of the city, run west and empty just outside the Gulf of Naples at a single large effluent on the shoreline below Mt. Cuma. —Channel
rainwater,
however, into the waters along the urban shoreline
via a new system of channels (thus, the
introduction of modern dual-channel conduits); For 25 years,
while new buildings were going up and new streets
were being laid, the workers on the sewage front
juggled affluents, effluents, pipes, collectors,
drains, elevation pumps, skimmers, filters,
maintenance access shafts, and so forth. By 1915,
it was finished—a modern
system. It was good and served well for a number
of years. The city of Naples, however,
incorporated a number of surrounding communities
in the 1920s. That and, especially, the
helter-skelter expansion of the city after WWII
led to a situation where, by 1950, the system had
to meet the needs not just of normal population
growth, but growth within an area four times
greater than the one originally planned for. In 1949, a new
study was commissioned to rebuild the system. The
Cassa del
Mezzogiorno (the national Monetary Fund
for the South) kicked out the impressive sum of L.
22,322,900,000 [sic!] for the job. Strings of
numbers like that should be illegal, but that
figure in Italian lira (L.) equaled about 36
million US dollars in the early 1950s, when the
project was funded. Comparative purchasing power
is more complicated to calculate, but most indices
indicate that 36 million $US in the early 1950s
equals very roughly at least 300 million $US in
today’s terms, i.e. 2010. New work was
essentially a modernization of the old 1915
network plus expansion to include the areas
incorporated in the 1920s; these extended from San
Giovanni and the industrial areas in the east all
the way through the towns of Fuorigrotta, Bagnoli,
Soccavo and Pianura in the west, stopping short of
Pozzuoli, almost all the way to the Cuma effluent,
itself. As well, the extensions included all of
the Vomero and Posillipo communities, which were
mere villages in the 1880s. (By way of comparison,
the ex-village of Vomero is now the most heavily
populated in Naples in terms both of absolute
population and population density thanks to the
advent of modern high-rise construction
techniques.) The entire shoreline on the south, as
well, was modernized, including the industrial and
civilian ports. Most of that work
was finished by the 1970s. As well, the
aqueducts were upgraded to supply the increasing
needs of the city. There are now four main lines
that supply water from sources in Lazio, Molise and
Campania. Besides the 1885 aqueduct, there now exist
the Campania aqueduct (1958), the Western Campania
aqueduct (1998) and the Lufrano Aqueduct. The good news (among
all this very difficult work to upgrade the
city) has to do with population. The 1967
report, cited below, contains this: "...[water supply]...will increase with the completion of the Campano aqueduct to about 350 liters per person per day (including the amounts provided by existing aqueducts) for a population of 1,425,000, predicted by the year 2000...the calculations run through to the year 2020 and aim at a sufficient water supply for the predicted population of 1,650,000."That figure is way off. The current population of Naples is just under one million, somewhat less than in 1951! According to the predictions, Naples should have around 1,500,000 right now. What happened? Well, it is true that increaed mobility since the 1950s has made it easier for people simply to live outside the citry limits. That has happened in Naples as it has happened elsewhere, so that affects the numbers a bit. The real factor, however, is growth rate. The professors with the crystal balls in 1967 predicted growth based on a figure of about 0.7%. A population growth rate of 1% will double a population in 70 years, so the one million figure for Naples in 1951, at somewhat less than one percent growth—0.7%—would give us a steady rise; indeed, the population in Naples hit about 2,200,000 in 1972, so the prediction seemed on track. Then, however, the bottom fell out of the growth rate; the Pill and the concept of Zero Population Growth had arrived in Europe. A growth rate of 0.7% is much higher than most places in Europe have right now. The population growth in Italy, in general, is less than zero at the moment and a smidgen above zero in the south. The figure of 0.7% was somewhat of a worst-case scenario, and it didn't happen. So, the Grand Poo-Bah's job is a bit easier. sources: Much of this information comes from Il sottosuoli di Napoli [The Subsoil of Naples], commissioned and published by the city of Naples in 1967. The complete report is on-line in Italian and English on the website of Napoli Underground. |
I
apologize to Gilbert & Sullivan fans. My guy is
not really a Poo-Bah. In fact, he is not even a