'Half my family has cancer' Will Italy finally face up to the deadly blight of illegal waste?

Soon after her son was born, Marzia Caccioppoli moved to Casalnuovo di Napoli, a town surrounded by countryside on the outskirts of Naples, to get away from the chaos and pollution of the sprawling southern Italian city.

- Angela Giuffrida

"Antonio was a strong and healthy boy, but I wanted him to grow up in a place where he could breathe clean air," she said. The decision, however, proved fatal. It was 2003 and Caccioppoli had unwittingly moved to the "triangle of death," a vast area to the north-east of Naples where the mafia had established the lucrative business of burying, dumping and burning toxic waste. The result was the poisoning of swathes of farmland and drinking water. Rather than living the long and wholesome life his mother had hoped for him, Antonio was dead by the time he was 10.

The illegal waste dumping, often carried out in cahoots with local police and politicians, was made public by a mafia turncoat in the late 1990s, around the time the early signs of its effects started to appear: first farm animals born with deformities, then an anomalous rise in cancer cases, especially rare forms of the disease among children. But the deeply rooted racket, which over time has had devastating repercussions on health, the environment and livelihoods, has never been adequately dealt with, whether by local, regional or national authorities.

That could be about to change. Caccioppoli was among the 41 plaintiffs who took a case against the Italian state to the European court of human rights, where judges ruled that despite long being aware of the issue, successive governments had failed in their duty to tackle the crisis. Almost 3 million residents in 90 municipalities had been denied their "right to life".

The Strasbourg-based court has given Italy two years to compile a strategy to resolve the issue, including setting up an independent monitoring mechanism and a public information platform.