A photograph in a show at the Madre Museum on Naples’s garbage crisis.

MICHAEL KIMMELMAN ESSAY

NAPLES, Italy - The posters on Claudio Velardi’s office walls mix alluring Neapolitan sites with phrases like “Monnezza a chi?” (Who are you calling trash?). Mr. Velardi, a public relations expert recruited from Rome, runs the regional tourism office here. His advertising campaign to counter images that have plagued Naples since last year - the endless news photographs of rotting garbage in the streets - clearly hasn’t done much, not yet, anyway, to turn around the city’s fortunes. Tourists still stay away in large numbers, notwithstanding that for months the center of town has been immaculate.
Culture was supposed to be Naples’s salvation, as so often is the hope in former industrial centers. The steelworks that drove much of the local economy had mostly closed by the end of the 1970s. The earthquake in 1980 compounded the misery. Then things looked better, for a while.
“We had a dream,” said Nicola Spinoza, who is in charge of Naples’s state museums. He shook his head, remembering the promise squandered by the time Antonio Bassolino, an ex-Communist who became mayor in 1993, had left office and moved on to be governor of the region.
Culture was Mr. Bassolino’s weapon of choice as mayor for bringing about change. Capitalizing on money and aid that had already begun to flow in after the quake, the city refurbished dozens of churches, museums and dilapidated palaces, and cleared downtown landmarks like the Piazza del Plebiscito of cars and muggers to make way for temporary art installations. Naples began to brand itself as a hotbed of filmmakers, actors and musicians.
Today Neapolitans complain, as they used to, about unemployment, traffic and crime, and also about the garbage-disposal services, which for years have been infiltrated by the local mafia, the Camorra. Nothing really changed in the end.
“We have woken up from our dream, and the reality seems even worse than before,” an exasperated Mr. Spinoza said. “It isn’t actually so different from 20 years ago, but it feels like it’s even worse because we had that dream.” There are bright spots on the culture front. In the apse of a disused church, now part of the Madre Museum for contemporary art, an exhibition examines the garbage crisis and civic identity. The church is glorious, and the exhibition isn’t half-bad, either. Madre since 2005 has occupied the renovated Donnaregina palace next door, with a dozen permanent installations by big-name artists like Richard Serra and Anish Kapoor filling the enormous, light-filled first floor.
“I agree there is no rational reason for hope,” said Angelo Curti, a local film and theater producer. “But artists by their nature look beyond the present and try to do the impossible. It’s like Naples’s traffic. If you can drive here, you can drive anywhere.”
The big question is how much culture ever does to turn around a struggling city. Turin, Italy, and Bilbao, Spain, are success stories, but less complicated. “Today,” Mr. Spinoza, an art historian, said with a sigh, “there is no longer a culture of illuminated leadership and Naples has become provincial, closed onto itself. Now it’s just a producer of poverty, unemployment and trash, and I don’t mean just the trash in the streets, which you can remove, but inside ourselves.”
That grim assessment is not quite universal. “Look,” said Erri de Luca, a Neapolitan novelist, “the city has been in much worse shape than now. For a while, the Sixth Fleet was its only major asset, and Naples was the fleet’s bordello. Street culture - actors and musicians, singers and craftsmen - remains vibrant. It is also a city accustomed to calamity.
“It will survive,” he added. “It’s stronger than the seas.”
Mr. de Luca no longer lives here. He moved years ago to Rome.