[Opinion] Naples vs. Hamburg

“I walked along the port for 800 meters but could not find one happy fisherman, whom I looked forward to seeing, managing fishing nets and singing Santa Lucia. Instead, threatening abandoned ships and mountains (literally!) were piles of trash everywhere.”

When I heard the news that Naples is being buried under a mountain of trash, I was reading a chapter about Naples in Bill Bryson’s “Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe.” The author travelled to the city in 1993.

And it seems even 15 years ago, according to Bryson anyway, Naples was a city that had nothing more than trash. And now, it has truly become a “trash city.” As the city ran out of places to put trash, garbage collection has been stopped since last Christmas. Thousands of tons of rotting garbage block the streets and tourists, the main revenue source of Naples, have stopped visiting the city. The Italian government was referred to the European Court of Justice for not fulfilling its obligation to dispose garbage.

But Hamburg came to the rescue. The tidy city signed a contract with Naples to deal with 30,000 tons of trash by incineration, transporting the garbage by train.

On Hamburg Bryson wrote, “People here not only created a city but also newly created themselves. With intelligence and diligence, they recreated their appearance with affluence, elegance and beauty. I can readily give my fate to the hands of Germans looking at today’s Hamburg.”

Naples lives on its past glories (Pompei) but did not invest in its future, while Hamburg has escaped from its past (World War II) to be reborn as a clean and affluent city. A country’s fate is no different. In this sense, the two European cities have certainly given Korea a lot to think about.

Editorial Writer Chung Seong-hee (shchung@donga.com)