ROME: If the children of Naples had their way, they would ask Batman to save them from rotting garbage that threatens a major health emergency and may force some schools to close early for the summer holidays.

The Naples “garbage crisis” has dominated news in Italy for weeks as local and national authorities have tried to end a stalemate over mountains of trash rotting on the streets for lack of adequate landfill sites.

President Giorgio Napolitano, himself a Neapolitan, called the situation “tragic” and on Friday leading national newspaper La Repubblica published children’s views of the crisis.

Enter the caped crusader.

“I’ll save you,” Batman says in a speech bubble of a drawing by eight-year-old Raffaele after a class exercise in his Naples elementary school where teachers invited the children to vent their anger and frustration creatively.

In the background of Raffaele’s drawing, near Batman, stand an overflowing garbage bin and sacks of stinking rubbish.

In one tough neighbourhood, a child wrote in an essay “Jail would be better than this garbage”.

With the few landfill sites full to the brim, garbage collectors stopped picking up rubbish.

The crisis has coincided with a late spring heat wave and schools in several towns in the Naples area have been shut because of the health threat posed by garbage outside. Some fear they may remain closed for the rest of the academic year.

Every night in the past week, fire brigades have had to put out dozens of fires in Naples and its province after irate residents, fearing outbreaks of disease, set trash heaps alight.—Reuters