This is a normal, and tolerated, garbage scene on a street in southern Italy.

There will soon be a blog devoted solely to garbage on the Italian seaside south of Naples.

Why? Because there are blossoming stacks of garbage everywhere. Even when trash collectors aren’t on strike. Even when it’s May and there aren’t many tourists to blame.

The norm is piles upon heaps upon full trash bins of smelly rat-infested garbage. Mountains of tossed-away garbage. Even on the beach.

Many beaches in southern Italy and Sicily look like this.

How can one of the most aesthetic developed countries on earth be one of the trashiest?

Is tossing garbage anywhere, and pointedly ignoring waste receptacles, a genetic trait in southern (not that the north is that much better) Italy?

Is this the way Italians declare their personal independence and irritation with authority?

Is the Mafia failing to organize its garbage-collecting troops?

Is it a “sociocultural” thing, as twentysomething Alessandra tried to convince me this morning?

Or has garbage become the latest form of creative expression. Is every litterbug an artist? If so, we’ve got a lot Michelangelos and Leonardos coming our way from southern Italy.

What’s ironical is that the country has one of the most comprehensive recycling plans in the European Union. It just hasn’t caught on.

Wouldn't it be nice if this scene in Erice worked everywhere else!

Actually I’ve learned to appreciate the vast amount of garbage strewn throughout Italy because it contrasts with the country’s omnipresent natural and manmade beauty. Garbage enables me to enjoy, as I MedTrek along the seaside, a yin-and-yang effect. I value beauty much more because of ugly garbage.

Incidentally the reason I thought about garbage today is that there is progress. Look at this neat garbage situation in Balestrate, the home of my Sicilian ancestors. In fact, the northwest corner of Sicily, from Balestrate to San Vito, deserves an award for trying to keep things clean.

Now I can live with this!

And seeing all this garbage gives me more and more anecdotes for a long rumination on the topic, which also says much about southern Italy and the Mezzogiorno mentality, that will appear in my sequel to “The Idiot and the Odyssey: Walking the Mediterranean.

Oh, no, here’s a PS on May 13.

Alas, garbage in southwestern Sicily isn’t as tidy as garbage in northwestern Sicily.

Text: Joel Stratte-McClure

Photos: Judy Barnett (2, Southern Italy), Joel Stratte-McClure (2, Sicily)

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About Joel

Joel Stratte-McClure has been a global trekker since the 1970s. He lived in France for over 30 years, working as a journalist, before he turned his attention to a unique life-time-project of walking the shores of the Mediterranean. The first 4,401 kilometers are explored in his inspirational and entertaining first book "The Idiot and the Odyssey: Walking the Mediterranean." The next 4,401 kilometers are covered in the gods-filled sequel, "The Idiot and the Odyssey II: Myth, Madness and Magic on the Mediterranean,” published on Valentine's Day 2013. The last 4,401 kilometers will be discussed in the last book of the trilogy currently entitled "The Idiot and the Odyssey III: Alexander the Great Walks the Mediterranean."