Public garbage collection fascinates me here. The market in the Campo de Fiori produces A LOT of garbage. Instead of requiring vendors to keep track of their own garbage, it is piled up throughout the campo until midday when the market begins to shut down. Then the piles of garbage become mountains. After the vendors have vacated the square the garbage sits for about half an hour before the city's garbage collectors make their rounds. (Apparently garbage collecting is a highly esteemed job. I have seen quite a few girls in their 20s dressed in the red garbage woman's attire.) There are two types of public garbage collectors: those that come in big trucks and those that arrive in tiny go-cart-like vehicles that only have three wheels. Cleaning the Campo takes about an hour, and then the collectors move on.
Now, this isn't that spectacular, since there is a daily market in the Campo it makes sense to make a daily event of garbage collection. But this happens everywhere! There are no garbage cans anywhere on the streets...and everyone walks while they eat, so garbage accumulates in very odd places. It just seems bizarre to me.
Private garbage collection is another matter altogether. It is quite intimidating. I literally have five different garbage cans in my room, each for a specific type of waste: plastics, food and biodegradable waste, etc, etc, etc. Each of these is collected on a different day of the week, and the site where you throw away the trash is monitored by cameras. So I desperately try not to create any sort of garbage at all. If I happened to mess up the system, they would find out about it, and I would be fined 200 euro.
Macho men with fruity gelatto
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