That Time I Became an Italian Garbage Criminal

La Dolce Vita, Recycling, and All Those Bewildering Bins

THIS is the view I live for when I’m in Narni, just a few streets from the future Wardrobe Bookshop. Evenings I pop out for a walk with my little dog Lyra at sunset, sit on a bench for a few moments and just take in all this beauty.

We flew back to Amsterdam yesterday, and I’m still in withdrawal. I probably won’t fully recover until I’m back on a plane to Italy. Which will be in a little over two months, so I can’t complain. Much.

It was a really productive trip. Beyond my wildest dreams, in fact, although I have spent enough time trying to accomplish bureaucratic tasks in Italy that my wildest dreams have become fairly moderate. At least in this area. Meaning that I’m supremely contented by the fact that our house in Italy (and the future bookshop, by extension) now has electricity, water, gas, AND internet. As well as some furniture! Pretty much all the necessities have been accomplished, as well as some delicious extras I’ll be sure to tell you all about in a future post.

In the meantime, I apologize in advance for continuing to talk about garbage. It’s just been on my mind so much lately. Last week I finally crossed off that last pesky item on my to-do list: “research garbage.” It wasn’t so very difficult in the end to find the phone number for setting up waste collection, which in Italy is called TARI (tassa sui rifiuti, or “waste tax”). But researching was, of course, only the first step. That line on my to-do list really ought to have read “solve garbage.”

Which, spoiler, I did not.

Italians are very responsible when it comes to recycling. Anything you buy will usually have a little guide on it telling you which parts of the packaging belong in which recycling bucket. Different areas of Italy have different ways of handling garbage collection, but all of them involve you becoming a high-level expert in separating out your own recycling.

When we lived in a little town on the edge of the Alps in Piemonte fifteen years ago, the municipality dispensed a different type of bag for each specific type of recycling. The paper bag was made of paper, for instance, the plastic bag was plastic, the bag for kitchen scraps was biodegradable, etc. There was even a special bag for diapers, though I’m not sure what special properties that bag possessed, since I never actually saw one. By American standards, they were all tiny bags, so taking out the garbage had to happen pretty often. We were supposed to deposit the full bags in the corresponding dumpsters, clustered in a congenial little society of garbage bins down the street. Which in theory was a very clever and enlightened waste disposal system.

However. When we first moved in, there was a shortage of several kinds of bags, including those elusive diaper bags. Our two toddlers—the reason we were in need of special diaper disposal bags in the first place—meant we had our hands full, and didn’t always manage to stay on top of everything like we ought to have. Such as properly sorting our garbage in the absence of the corresponding bags. I’m embarrassed to confess that after two weeks of this, we fell into desperation and filled several giant black trash bags with a transgressive mix of the trash and those kinds of recycling for which the municipality had run out of bags.

But what to do with all that garbage? Throwing it in the bins was out of the question. The proper bags for “undifferentiated refuse” (anything left over after everything else had gone for recycling) were red, ridiculously small, and one of the kinds of bags the municipality had run out of. It would be illegal for us to toss our unseemly black bags into the undifferentiated refuse bin. Worse, it would be noticeable. Our tiny town already looked on “the Californians” as quite the novelty. In fact, we were written up in the local paper just for moving in from abroad. Everyone in town seemed to be connected to a cosmic grapevine that tracked our movements with uncanny precision. Someone was bound to see us disposing of our garbage incorrectly. We didn’t want to give them anything darker to gossip about than our strange habit of eating dinner at 6pm.

Which is how we found ourselves one night with both kids strapped into the carseats and the entire trunk of our hatchback station wagon full of garbage. We were on our way to the town next door, which hadn’t transitioned yet to an eco-friendly system and still had municipal dumpsters where you could deposit your trash in any which unenlightened way. We waited till it was dark, and the whole time we had our eyes peeled for the Carabinieri, the Italian military police. Who once DID stop us when we were out late at night, driving around suspiciously in an exhausted, desperate bid to put our kids to sleep. Luckily, they didn’t catch us with our garbage.

I’d like to say we only did this once. But in reality, we carried on with these subversive garbage runs for at least a month, until the municipality finally got in a shipment of those darn red bags. In my defence, this strategy was suggested to me by a neighbour when I shamefacedly confessed our dilemma. So I’d like to think we weren’t the only ones resorting to it from time to time.

The whole thing left me with an absolute paranoia when it comes to garbage in Italy. Believe it or not, I’m by nature a rule-follower, and all this sneaking around with my illicit trash took a severe psychological toll. I vowed never to dig myself into a hole (or a dumpster) like that again. Hence the item “research garbage” on my to-do list. In Narni, it turns out, we get our own little collection of color-coded buckets, which made me initially optimistic.

The bins in the photo are not my bins, however—though I wish they were. They’re the bins belonging to our host at the AirBnB we rented for our first week because our utilities still weren’t hooked up. She also made this handy little chart. I’d love to know what percentage of her guests manage to remember to put the proper bucket out the night before each specific recycling day. I mostly did, if only to atone for my past crimes.

I should have gotten right on solving garbage as soon as I arrived in Italy, but I was much occupied with water, internet, and gas, which I foolishly prioritised. Last Wednesday, I finally got around to making an appointment to go into the little city utilities office in the centre of Narni to set up my garbage collection. It’s the same little office that on Tuesdays and Thursdays is dedicated to the local water company, which I tried to set up when we were last there.

Speaking of which, the water actually DID get turned on at our house a few days before we arrived; we just didn’t know it. When Tony went to check that the little outdoor metal door to the metre would be easy for the technician to open, he discovered that the water was already on, and all he needed to do was turn a knob in the basement to open the flow to the house. I wasn’t home at the time. He sent me a video of the sink tap running, and I may have indulged in a small, private display of my own waterworks.

He also found a weathered scrap of paper that turned out to be a failed delivery notice for the internet modem from back at the beginning of September. After several fruitless emails and phone calls, we had finally dropped into the ENEL energy company office, which manages our gas, electricity and fibre internet. They said they would put a note in my file for someone to call me to set up internet and re-send the modem (and an extra note that I’d only be there till October 1). And sure enough, the next day they called to set up the appointment!

Another call resulted in the modem being sent out again. I took the precaution of filling out a form online telling the driver to leave the package at the nearest drop-off point so I could pick it up and not miss it again. But then I had a moment of absolute panic when we were a half hour away in Terni, the next town over, shopping for a washing machine. Occasionally people text or even email in Italy, but mostly they’re constantly calling on the phone. In Amsterdam I habitually keep my ringer off, but in Italy I keep it on at all times for fear of missing one or another all-important call. Like this one. The modem delivery guy was in Narni, about to deliver the modem to my empty house. Again. I guess it hadn’t been communicated to him to leave it at the local Tabaccheria I’d chosen on the online form. But he was perfectly willing to drop it there when I entreated him over the phone.

Tabaccherias are ubiquitous in Italy. The name translates to “tobacco shop,” and they do sell cigarettes, but also newspapers, postage stamps, bus tickets, candy, and other bits and bobs. In Amsterdam when I go to pick up a package at the corner store, they scan my ID and then disappear into the back room where they’ve organized all the packages by recipient. So I made sure I had my Italian identity card when I went down to the Tabaccheria to pick up my modem. I walked straight up to the man behind the counter and said, I think you may have a package for me? He didn’t ask my name, so I offered it. He looked at me as if I were acting very strange, then gestured toward a lower shelf behind me, which was overflowing with packages. I rummaged through until I found the slim box addressed to me. On the way out, I stopped at the counter again, wondering if now was when they’d do the ID check. But no! With a smile and a good day, he sent me on my way. I guess Narni is small enough that nobody’s stealing each other’s packages at the Tabaccheria.

Now we had the modem, but when the technician showed up to connect the super fast fibre internet we’ve been promised exists in Narni, the signal disappeared somewhere between the box and our house. So he left. No internet. He said he’d try to come back with a colleague to fix the problem, but lots of people were on vacation just then, so it might be awhile. We had only a few days left in Narni, so the goal of getting internet this trip receded into the unknowable distance.

I focused on other things, such as, yes, garbage. The lady at the city utilities office set me up with a contract, and on the back she wrote the address where I was supposed to go pick up my five bins. Unfortunately, when we arrived at the prescribed location, they’d run out of all the bins except (silver lining, I suppose) undifferentiated refuse. And yes, each bin has a bar code they scan when they pick up the garbage, so you can’t just use any old bin you might have around. New bins would be arriving sometime in October, which means we won’t be picking up ours till we get back to Italy in December. If they’re not out of stock again by then.

We took our one bin home, but the next time undifferentiated refuse was going to be collected would be (if you’ll refer to the landlady’s cheat sheet above) Wednesday, and we were leaving Tuesday. Which was a bit of a problem. It pains me to confess that between housecleaning and furniture delivery and various other sources of waste generation, we were once again in the situation of having several large bags of extra garbage piling up in our kitchen. Which, I hasten to say, this time we had properly separated.

Still, a trunk full of garbage. It felt like déjà vu. I was determined to get out of our trash predicament properly this time. But time was running out. On our last full day in Narni, we were just on our way out the door to the municipal dump when the internet technician unexpectedly rang our doorbell. He’d come back, as promised, with a colleague. This time they succeeded! I can confirm that the internet is very fast indeed (hooray!), but we had no time to revel in this unexpected windfall because by now the dump would be closing in an hour. It’s only open for three hours every morning.

We rushed out the door, toting our giant bags of garbage, did the walk of shame through the main piazza to get to our car, then drove to the dump and sat in a line of cars for twenty minutes as people were let in one by one. I can’t be the only one who’s noticed that garbage feels like a controlled substance in Italy. Finally, we made it inside, where they asked us what we’d brought. We sheepishly owned up to one bag of plastic, another of organic kitchen waste in a biodegradable bag (doubled, because the first appeared immediately at the point of bursting), and three bags—yes, three!—of undifferentiated waste.

“We’ll take the plastic,” she said briskly. And there was nothing for it but to leave the dump with four bags of garbage still in our trunk. On our way home we took a wrong turn that ended us up in front of a car demolition ground with an olive grove on the side, where I’m sorry to say we surreptitiously offloaded our organic kitchen waste into an empty industrial-sized organic waste bin belonging to someone else, and then sped off before we could be apprehended. By this time, I’d resigned myself to yet again finding ourselves on the sketchy side of Italian waste disposal laws. We pulled brazenly into a gas station parking lot, scoped it out like criminals, then jumped out of the car to unload our final three bags of undifferentiated waste into a set of garbage bins in the most remote, hidden part of the parking lot.

In the end, we got away with it, though I’m still not convinced someone didn’t catch us on camera. Will we be receiving a fine in the mail sometime? Will they track me down for a scolding? Am I paranoid? I just really want to be a good immigrant, to do things properly. This is probably why I feel a need to adhere to the rules for when you’re allowed to drink cappuccinos, or exactly how many minutes to cook the different pasta shapes. I have to make up for my flagrant transgressions in other areas.

Anyway, that’s basically how the last two weeks went, with many variations. I hope to become a more upstanding citizen next time we go to Italy.

However, lest you think I spent my entire two weeks in Narni obsessing about garbage, we also went out to pizza with new friends, saw several spectacular sunsets, and were introduced to Narni’s very own cinema. Normally, movies in Italy are dubbed into Italian, but the cinema in Narni does regular showings in the original language with subtitles. And it’s in an absolutely lovely little palazzo. Just one more unexpected little gem of goodness in my favourite Italian town. We will definitely be going back!