The Italian actress, Sophia Loren, has made an impassioned appeal for a trash cleanup in Naples and in her birthplace, the Naples suburb of Pozzuoli. "I beg you to free Campania, the province of Naples and my own Pozzuoli, the house that I was born in and the places that I loved, from this terrible garbage catastrophe. I ask it in the name of all the Neapolitans scattered through the world and also in the name of those who are not yet born but who love this land".

Loren, who lives in Geneva, sent her appeal to the Italian daily, La Repubblica, saying she could not understand how the present situation could have been allowed to occur. At present, some 2,000 tons of uncollected trash are lining the streets of Pozzuoli, a town in the midst of the so-called Campi Flegrei,or Phlegraean Fields, a volcanic caldera or bowl which still emits steam from a series of fumeroles or fissures in the ground and which is thus an important tourist destination. Bags of uncollected and malodorous garbage are piled up along the outside gates of the L'Anfiteatro Flavio or Flavian Amphitheatre, one of two Roman amphitheatres in Pozzuoli and probably built by the same architects who built the Colosseum of Rome. The apartment that Sophia Loren, whose real name is Sofia Scicolone, grew up in looks out over the amphitheatre, a place where several Christian martyrs, including the Neapolitan saint S. Gennaro, are said to have died and where local children, including the Scicolone kids, used to play.

The 74-year old actress said she was deeply saddened by the images of Naples and the surrounding Campania region which have been broadcast on television.