Palermo

How beautifully Palermo lies in the middle of a bay: La Conca d’Oro – these Italian words for the “golden clam” sound so lyrical to German ears. Palermo – this magnificent old city with its tumbledown palaces, winding, dark lanes, lively marketplaces, bustling streets of shops ... and the piles of rubbish stinking to high heaven.

I take an evening stroll through the Vucciria with a detour to La Kalsa. The restaurants and bars on the Piazza Marina are busy with customers, I wander lost in thought through the narrow lanes, gaze up at the crumbling façades and suddenly feel a slippery, undefined something under my shoes. I slip momentarily over the dust-dry cobbles of Via Alessandro Paternostro. A riotous heap of rubbish leans against the wall and in front of it plastic sacks full of fermented foodstuffs flow onto the street. Cars wishing to drive past have no choice but to drive straight through rotten tomatoes, vegetable muck and refuse.

The next day I take the Via Roma to Via Vittorio Emanuele, the Cassaro. It is a typical tourist route and a group of smiling Japanese visitors halts and looks at mountains of torn plastic foil, Styrofoam remnants, shredded advertising flyers and overflowing garbage bins at the Calzature Pelletterie. The inner courtyard of the Cattedrale is a virtual benefaction by comparison: it is nearly clean here with the exception of a few full bins.

North of Cassaro the way leads into the Capo quarter. Everywhere along the street, rags and split refuse bags lie on the ground. Bottles and heaps of trash even lie in front of the Palazzo di Justicia. Behind the Palazzo, the road goes to Mercato del Capo and through the Porta Carini to Via Volturno. An elderly man stumbles on having to keep his balance walking over crates lying on the pedestrian crossing. Then, at the Foro Italico, a sort of mirage appears: there they are, two street sweepers raking the leaves. They almost lovingly rake the twigs and leaves into symmetrical piles. Then, towards the north on Via dei Barilai we see the familiar sight: trash heaps on the pavement.

“Palermo stinks” was the motto over six months ago when the refuse collection service went on strike. The mountains of garbage just keep growing. It would be unthinkable in Berlin; the state government would long ago have intervened and put pressure on the city, for the Berliner Stadtreinigung (BSR) is a municipal service with 5,300 employees that is funded by citizens’ fees.

In Berlin, we don’t see big heaps of refuse as here in Palermo, but we do have little “land mines” on the streets.

Land mines – Tretminen – everyone in Berlin knows the word for canine excrement. Everyone has stepped into one of the muck hills and walked on cursing loudly. To counter the dog poop, 20 so-called dog dirt suction devices, 120 pavement machines and 1,600 street cleaners are on duty, which, in addition to the regular waste disposal, eliminate 55 tonnes of excrement of the 200,000 dogs living in Berlin. That means approximately 156 million poop heaps per year, which would line up on a street 5,200 kilometres long. Those who do not clean up after their dogs are charged a 35 euro penalty, yet this is merely theoretical since law enforcers must catch doggie and master in the act.

In the early 1990s, the BSR had more than 11,000 employees and in spite of the many municipal cleaners, twenty years ago Berlin had a truly grubby image. The city of the allies was ruled by different laws than those in “West Germany” and there were other worries besides garbage. Then the 1990s came with social upheaval after the opening of the wall. Everywhere people were building, entire quarters were redeveloped and Berlin was one big construction site.

Today, the Berliners take better care of their city. They throw away less refuse and identify more with their city. An area of 890 square kilometres is home to 3.4 million people who produce approximately one million tonnes of domestic waste per year and 80,000 tonnes of street litter. Yet this is another solely Berlin phenomenon: the employees of the BSR empty bins on the streets, but not the overflowing containers in the public parks. It is especially astonishing and annoying at the weekend that the twelve Berlin districts are responsible for the parks. Their employees have the weekends off. The trash stays put until Monday.