entry May
2010
the Naples sewer system
Me & the Grand Poo-Bah of Cuma
I apologize
to Gilbert & Sullivan fans. My guy is not really
a Poo-Bah. In fact, he is not even a he.
He is an it,
called in Italian, Il Grande Emissario di Cuma. Far
from being some Magna Greek
potentate sitting with Sybil
on Mt. Cuma and directing trireme traffic below, my
Emissary is simply something that emits. In this
case, Il Grande
Emissario di Cuma is better translated as
the Large Cuma Effluent —or, the Big Sewer. And if I
had known all that some years ago when I went
swimming at Cuma, I might not have done so.
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 sewer 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 sewer
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);
—Regulate rain run-off in the
hill areas.
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 at this writing (2010). What happened? Well, it is true that increased mobility since the 1950s has made it easier for people simply to live outside the city 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 1,200,000 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:
Most of this information comes from Il sottosuoli di Napoli [The Subsoil of Naples], commissioned and published by the city of Naples in 1967. As of Oct. 2019, the complete report published in English on the NUg (Napoli Underground website is no longer on-line. It is now, however, in the pages of this Naples: Life, Death & Miracles website, here.
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