Like Mary Wells, I have no love for Naples.

The city not only lives in chaos, it exudes a sense of chaos that pervades everything — your hotel room, the air ("what is that smell?"), the streets — even the airport. Of course, the occasionally smoking volcano Vesuvius looming over the city reminds you that it destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 AD, and God knows what unrecorded places in its time. You can’t look at it without thinking: Kaboom! Though of course Pliny the Younger reported at the time that the eruption had been preceded by an earthquake.

The grotesques alarm me. I remember being in my boyfriend’s car waiting at a traffic light in Naples as the pedestrians crossed — first a very old, very poor man carrying a plastic bag with one leek in it; then a young man, vacant-eyed, his skull so misshapen that you could only think this was what they call "water on the brain"; then a pair of little girls, wearing makeup, the older one — who seemed about eleven – visibly and horrifyingly pregnant.

I remember, not long after the 1981 earthquake, when a Neapolitan took me for pizza in a café between two buildings that were braced together so as not to fall in on each other and flatten the café. My host, pouring olive oil from the long spout of a metal can onto the pizza, explained that you had to be real to appreciate Naples. I decided fake suited me just fine.

So Mary’s posting last week about the garbage was spot on (click here to read it). And this morning’s news from the BBC (click here to read it) is a fitting end to the story: just as the European Union is taking Italy to court for its incapacity to deal with the mountains of garbage, trash, rubbish, refuse and crap in the streets, the Neapolitans have taken matters into their own hands and set it alight. Kaboom!