Travel

RUBBISH AND CHURCHES. Grandeur and decay. Italy is an old place – and it shows. Rome, a world city, is full of skips and wheelie-bins overflowing with uncollected trash. Romans pass by these eyesores without so much as a second glance. It’s not desirable, they seem to say, but it’s the best we can do. Refuse collection, like so much else in Italy, is a racket. Somebody is making a lot of money out of Rome’s rubbish – but far too few people are being paid to collect it. And so, as is customary in the Eternal City, things pile up.