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The lookouts spot us in seconds. "Maria! Maria!" they shout, raising the alarm with their code word for "police." Trying to stay calm, we go in the building anyway, and find that every window has been shattered. The concrete and marble have been ripped apart as if by a giant claw. The elevators are gone. Broken pipes spew water everywhere and the floors are covered with garbage. The air smells of smoke from a fire outside.

The carcass of a car, its roof ripped off, lies in the basement. "Behold the new Fiat Cabriolet," says one of our escorts.

Incredibly, the place is still occupied even though it looks like a bomb site and has been condemned as unsafe. A mother and her daughter scurry by, giving us a curious look before they disappear. A simple wooden chair occupies a long open corridor on one of the upper levels. It's where the drug dealer sits while plying his trade.

We're in Scampia, the district at the north end of Naples that represents the dark side of Italy, the one that tourists aren't told about and the nation's politicians, facing an election in April, would rather forget. Never in 25 years as a working journalist in four countries have I seen such shocking urban decay and desolation. It's clear why Antonino Puglisi, the city's police chief, insists that the only way to come here is with an armed guard.

We talk to Mr. Puglisi in his wood-panelled office in downtown Naples, a comfortable distance from the horror of Scampia. At first, he is in very good spirits. His detectives have just nailed Vincenzo (Fatso) Licciardi, one of the top bosses in the homegrown Mafia, known as the Camorra. The canyons of rotting refuse — the overflow from overfed dumps that had to stop taking garbage just before Christmas — are slowly being cleared with the help of the Italian army.

Naples, he explains, is just another big city with big-city problems; some get fixed, some don't.

"Other than the garbage, nothing in particular stands out" as a problem, he says. "The United States has gangs, we have the Camorra. We have four million inhabitants and there are a hundred murders a year."

His underlying message: The persistent portrayal of his "beautiful city" as an ungovernable, violent mess is either untrue or exaggerated.

Then, we announce that we plan to visit Scampia and Mr. Puglisi's mood suddenly changes. A few minutes later, two officers of the Squadra Volante, the emergency squad, appear and instruct us to follow their blue and white Alfa Romeo patrol car.

CHAPTER 1:

BEAUTY AND BEAST

The police chief is right, of course. His city is incredibly beautiful. Founded by the Greeks more than 2,500 years ago as Neapolis (New City) on a sweeping bay in the Tyrrhenian Sea, framed by Mount Vesuvius to the east and the island of Capri to the west, it and the surrounding region of Campania have a reputation as paradise on Earth.

The emperor Tiberius was so enthralled that he essentially ran the Roman empire from a hilltop villa on Capri for much of his reign. And for decades the Amalfi Coast south of Naples has been a magnet for movie stars, writers such as Gore Vidal and Virginia Woolf, dynasties such as the Kennedys and the ultrawealthy. The yachts of billionaires plug the marinas, and many Romans consider Naples more beautiful and lively than the Eternal City, with better food and weather — and a population famous for its charm, generosity and friendliness.

Even so, Naples may be the worst-governed city in Europe's worst-governed country.

Overflowing garbage has been a problem for almost two decades. Local cancer rates are well above the national average, probably because leaky dumps brimming with illegal toxic waste — courtesy of the Mob — are contaminating the ground water. As well as being routine, the Camorra's internecine wars can be extremely violent and sometimes kill or harm innocent bystanders; two years ago, a stray bullet hit a Canadian tourist in the leg. The army has to be called in every few years to shore up the police or clean the streets. The port of Naples is known to be a major contraband and narcotics transfer point. Corruption, poverty and general lawlessness are rife. Ditto for much of the surrounding region. Even sales of its famous cheese — mozzarella di bufala — have tumbled.

In fact, cursed Campania arguably contributed to the downfall last month of the centre-left government of prime minister Romano Prodi.

The chain of events started in January, when Clemente Mastella, Mr. Prodi's justice minister and a Campania resident, and his wife were made the subject of a criminal investigation. The allegation, which both deny, is that they manipulated appointments at the local hospital for political reasons. Mr. Mastella resigned, then yanked the support of his tiny, three-senator party from the ruling coalition.

The government — Italy's 61st since the Second World War — duly collapsed in a confidence vote. It didn't help that Mr. Prodi had been under attack for the Naples garbage crisis, which has sparked embarrassing headlines around the world, clobbered tourism in Capri and the Amalfi Coast as well as the city, and brought threats of penalties from the European Commission.

If the garbage crisis isn't resolved soon, or a fresh Camorra turf war breaks out, Naples could become a major issue in the election called for April 13 and 14. Even now, non-Italians can't quite understand how the city lurches from crisis to crisis and yet rarely elicits more than passing attention from the national government.

"A situation like Naples would not be tolerated in any other country," says Franco Pavoncello, a political scientist and president of Rome's John Cabot University who considers Italy the only "country in the Western world where one-quarter of the state is not controlled by the government."

He says Naples, along with the rest of Campania, neighbouring Calabria and Sicily — huge swaths of southern Italy — are more or less ungovernable, so politicians end up wondering: Why bother trying to fix it? "The Italian state doesn't control these areas and the citizens know the state cannot control them."

Naples has always been on the edge of anarchy. Since the fall of Rome in the fifth century, the city has had a long string of occupiers, from the Goths, Byzantines and Lombards to, in more recent centuries, the Bourbons, French and Spanish. Until Italian unification in the 1860s, it was essentially a feudal state. The Neapolitans learned to resent authority.

It was this suspicion of central authority that probably made life easier for organized crime. The oldest and most inventive of Italy's main regional Mafia powerhouses (Sicily has the Cosa Nostra and Calabria the 'Ndrangheta), the Camorra dates from the 1800s, when the Bourbon monarchy employed the tough guys as police and army officers. It suffered a rare setback under the strong-armed fascists of Benito Mussolini, whose granddaughter Alessandra was almost elected mayor of Naples in 1993, but roared back to power after the Second World War when, derelict and ignored by every level of government, the city turned to Mob bosses for food, jobs and security.

Eternal poverty has encouraged both the Camorra's rise and the Neapolitans' island mentality. The industrial giants of Italy and the rest of the continent have largely shunned the south, partly because of a lack of infrastructure and the long distance to the heart of Europe, but also because of the crime, the corruption and the Mafia. Lagging investment in everything from bridges to factories has left unemployment levels permanently high — the official rate in Naples is about 20 per cent.

The jobless or poorly paid naturally turn to what Mr. Pavoncello calls "micro-criminality" — theft, cigarette smuggling, tax evasion and the like — to make ends meet. Pilfering of expensive watches is so common that some hotels give their guests cheap plastic models to wear while taking a stroll. "The Neapolitans were always a people with no resources," he says, "so they had to fend for themselves."

Or the Neapolitans join the Camorra, which pays well, although the job can get you killed. You name it — prostitution, money laundering, narcotics, truck hijackings, rigged construction contracts, counterfeit fashion, usury loans to sweatshops, illegal toxic-waste disposal, kidnappings — the Mob is into it, often with local support. The annual murder rate has fallen in recent years to about 100, but the summer of 2006 alone saw more than 750 kidnappings reported in Naples.

CHAPTER 2:

'BRONX NAPOLI'

Following our police escort toward Scampia, we fight chaotic traffic while climbing the hills behind the lovely downtown core, a UNESCO World Heritage site. There is garbage everywhere, piled high and deep along the streets as the city struggles to find an alternative to the overflowing dumps.

We spot graffiti that reads, "Bronx Napoli 1999," an ironic twinning of Naples with New York's famously violent and dysfunctional borough (the police say they don't know what the date signifies).

Our destination is impossible to miss — a collection of enormous concrete high-rises, some tiered like pyramids, that were built after the Naples earthquake in 1980 and are home to about 60,000 people. As a piece of urban design, it is the opposite of the layout that makes many Italian cities so vibrant and alluring. There are no piazzas, no stores or tree-lined streets, no place to go for shade or coffee.

As far as the police are concerned, Scampia is not a "neighbourhood" at all. It is Italy's, and one of Europe's, biggest drug supermarkets and probably the Camorra's most profitable enterprise, next to waste disposal. Prosecutors have said the Mob's trade in cocaine, crack, hashish, heroin and a nasty form of low-grade heroin called kobret brings in more than $20-billion a year. The police say the drugs come from Spain, Gibraltar, Morocco and Colombia. From Scampia, they are dispersed throughout Italy and beyond.

The district's police station is a fortified concrete pile on the edge of the urban hell. Its boss, a wiry, cigar-chomping karate expert named Michele Maria Spina, tells us why it is so hard to make arrests and secure convictions: because of the vedette — the lookouts.

Typically young men in dark sunglasses, they loiter around building entrances, on balconies and rooftops, and alert the drug dealers when they spot anyone suspicious. They don't carry drugs, weapons or money, and are paid $300 to $400 a day — a fortune in this part of Naples, where the unemployment rate is 50 per cent or more. Once in a while, police perseverance delivers results, as it did last month when 23 lookouts were nabbed and charged with being accomplices to crime.

From the station, three muscular plainclothes officers take us in unmarked cars to the heart of Scampia: a vast, 13-storey building in such decay that it looks like the set of a post-apocalypse horror film. A few years ago, Italy's biggest bust of retail-ready heroin — 18,000 doses in plastic tubes — was made here.

One of our escorts recalls getting into a scuffle while trying to arrest a pusher here in 1998 and having his pistol grabbed by the suspect's pregnant 17-year-old girlfriend, who turned it on him and squeezed the trigger. He would have been dead had she not accidentally flipped on the gun's safety catch during the commotion. (Until recently, heavy weaponry has been rare in Scampia, but this may be changing. Recent raids have turned up a taser stun gun and a Kalashnikov assault rife.)

Because of the recent arrests, the lookouts are clearly nervous. They pop into their buildings, presumably to alert the drug dealers, and re-emerge. As interest intensifies in the presence of a small group of outsiders, one with a long-lens camera, we decide it's time to leave.

Jumping into the car, we drive by a long, filthy gully that runs parallel to the building. In a field nearby, children play soccer in the moonscape. But here the ground is covered with syringes. There are several obviously drugged men standing in the gully and they, too, are agitated. "Vaffanculo," one of them hisses — "fuck off." Another asks: "Why don't you clean this mess up?"

CHAPTER 3:

ITALY'S RUSHDIE

Roberto Saviano is trying to do his bit to clean up Naples by exposing the horror and sophistication of the crime syndicates. At 29, he is already one of Europe's better-selling authors. Recently published in English, his book Gomorra (the title is a play on Camorra and the Bible's wicked and doomed Gomorrah) has sold more than a million copies and won numerous awards since it appeared a year and a half ago.

A native Neapolitan, Mr. Saviano has spent his life observing the Camorra. He has investigated them and watched them in action at such close quarters that he once befriended a Mafia "welfare officer," who delivered money to the wives of locked-up mobsters. (He even worked for them, albeit indirectly as an assistant to a photographer whose specialty was Mafia weddings.) In an interview in 2006, he said the Camorra had murdered "about 3,600 people" since he was born. You can add a couple of hundred to that figure today.

His book covers the gamut of Camorra business and culture, from the gangsters' effect on everyday life ("Women stop wearing high heels — too hard to run in them") to how they shake down the city to build their criminal empires. The exposé is so detailed that it has made him Italy's Salman Rushdie, drawing death threats of such severity that he now keeps a low profile and receives round-the-clock police protection.

Communicating by e-mail, he tells us that the Naples garbage crisis comes as no surprise to him — organized crime takes in billions every year from illegal dumping.

He says the problem began in earnest in the 1990s, when the Camorra cleverly solved northern Italy's shortage of dumps and incinerator capacity by trucking the waste south and stuffing it into already-packed landfills and unlicensed sites ranging from farms to caves. (One cavern has been found brimming with the equivalent of 28,000 truckloads of trash.)

Because the Mob charges close to market rates to pick up the waste but dumps it for next to nothing, the profit margins are lavish. "We're talking about six billion euros in two years," Mr. Saviano says. "Farmlands bought at extremely low prices are transformed into illegal dumping grounds. Putting their own men into the local administration, the Camorra enters the waste business at all levels. … The type of garbage dumped includes everything: barrels of paint, printer toner, human skeletons, cloths used for cleaning cow udders, zinc, arsenic and the residue of industrial chemicals."

The authorities finally caught on in 2002, when the first of the "eco-Mafia" trials began. But the problem persists and people of Campania are suffering. In a 2006 study of 196 municipalities in the region, the World Health Organization found "significant excesses" — up to 12 per cent higher than the national average — for stomach, liver, kidney, lung and pancreatic cancer.

In the town of Acerra, about 20 kilometres northeast of Naples, sheep are dying because of high levels of toxicity found in the land. Sales of the famed mozzarella di bufala, a soft white cheese made from milk from water buffalo, have plummeted because of the outbreak of brucellosis among the animals. The bacterial disease may not be connected to the contaminated land, but consumers are not taking any risks and as many as 60,000 buffalo are being slaughtered.

The fear of poisonous pollution is so high that residents of Pianura, in the hills above Naples, have barricaded the streets and clashed with police to prevent the authorities from reopening an old dump nearby.

The government of Romano Prodi appointed a new "trash czar" — the ninth since the 1990s — to fix the Naples garbage problem. He has succeeded in reopening some dumps, although that's a temporary solution, and trash is being shipped to Germany for incineration. Other parts of Italy have offered to take some of the overflow and new incinerators are being planned, but illegal waste disposal isn't about to go away — it's just too profitable for the Camorra and those who help to cover up what it's doing. (Mr. Saviano says the "impunity of politicians" leads to the "impotence of citizens.")

CHAPTER 4:

'I'M ASHAMED'

Every once in a while, Naples gets so disgusted with itself that it fights back. About 20 years ago, the city seemed to hit rock bottom, after a gangland turf war from 1979 to 1985 left 700 dead. Citizens had had enough, and in the 1990s, Naples experienced something of a renaissance under an energetic and proud mayor, Antonio Bassolino, the centre-left politician who is now governor of Campania.

Mr. Bassolino cleaned up the downtown. The magnificent Piazza del Plebiscito next to the royal palace was restored and made traffic-free. Museums and churches were spruced up. The city had improved so much that it was able to play host to the 1994 Group of Seven summit with pride. Neapolitans took back the streets and tourism flourished.

There is little doubt the city has gone into reverse since then. Tourists are vanishing. Some Northern Italian cities printed posters that say: "Come visit: We are not Naples."

The locals were frustrated with corruption and violence even before the mountains of garbage filled their streets (and Mr. Bassolino's residence became a target for trash-tossing protesters). Carla di Napoli, a journalist for the daily newspaper Il Mattino, hopes that her children will decide to make their lives elsewhere. "We had a bit of hope in the 1990s," she says, but now Naples really is "like the Bronx."

"I don't feel secure walking the streets any more. I'm ashamed to be an Italian at this moment."

Ms. di Napoli blames the politicians and judiciary for corruption and feckless behaviour, and it's a view widely shared. Ernesto Gallo, a 61-year-old gatherer of scrap metal who works the grubby, garbage-plugged Sant' Erasmo area just beyond downtown, is as cynical as they come. "I want to send all the politicians to jail," he says. "Where the politicians live, it's clean."

In Scampia, garbage is the least of the problems for the police and the locals trapped in a war zone. Cleaning up the place seems impossible. The Camorra is too strong, too ruthless. Murders are still routine. Last month, a well-dressed young man wearing a Rolex was executed with four bullets to the head while riding his motorcycle through the neighbourhood. He was thought to be a drug dealer.

We ask the police if there's a solution, and they're only half-joking when they say the problem may simply fix itself: Three buildings from the 1980s urban dreamscape have already had to be torn down and neglect will eventually reduce the others to rubble. In time, they say, Scampia will simply cease to exist.

Eric Reguly is The Globe and Mail's correspondent in Rome, where Lorenzo Tondo is a freelance journalist.