Looking over the turquoise Mediterranean Sea, the beach at the tip of Bagnoli, hugged by cliffs in westernmost Naples, should be a picture of tranquillity. It is not.

“We cannot swim because of the extreme pollution from the ex-industrial area,” local resident Anja Raggia explains. “Toxic pollution is also spread about by the wind and causes locals to develop tumours and other diseases.”

Behind the beach, the skyline is haunted by the remnants of industry. Until 1992, Bagnoli had one of Italy’s largest steelworks, run by the state-owned company Italsider, in a massive industrial area which also produced cement and asbestos. Years after the closure of these industries, numerous peer-reviewed studies show lingering high concentrations of dangerous and often carcinogenic substances in the water and soil.

This pollution also affects people’s livelihoods: Fishing was a vital industry for Naples since its inception as a city and an outpost of ancient Greece. Yet in Bagnoli, mirroring other former steelworks across Italy, industry has “acutely toxified” the nearby seaside and with “genotoxic effects both in fish and molluscs.”

The beach belongs to everyone…in theory

Naples is the most significant city in southern Italy and the third biggest city in the country after Rome and Milan. It is known for its good food, chaotic streets, deep history and recent economic decline.

“Naples has 25 kilometres of coastline and access to much of it is forbidden due to pollution,” Rossario Nasti tells Equal Times. He is a participant from Naples involved in Mare Libero (meaning ‘Free the Sea’), an Italian-wide, grassroots movement for a healthy and accessible sea.

“The harbour is inaccessible due to cruise and other ships. Then other parts are inaccessible as they are owned by private owners.”

Many beaches in Naples or their access routes are privatised. Nasti continues: “As a result, 96 per cent of the coastline [in Naples] is either private or inaccessible. Mare Libero’s battle is to give the sea back to Neopolitans and everyone. We want to reclaim a healthy sea as a commons [editor’s note: land or resources that everyone shares the right to use, and the collective responsibility to care for].”

The situation in Naples encapsulates a broader problem in Italy. Technically, the coastline is nationalised, yet beach owners buy swathes of seafront land and then charge high prices to beachgoers. Pollution is also widespread.

Mare Libero in Naples employs multiple strategies, Nasti explains: “We take direct actions, such as opening the gates that impede access. We take symbolic actions, like creating a beach in front of Naples town hall with deck chairs and volleyball. We do legal actions, reporting the town council and port authorities, for instance, for locking gates unlawfully.”

Other actions include mass trespasses onto privatised beaches. Canoes are also used to leaflet private beachgoers explaining that the beach should be free for everyone. Mare Libero in Naples has also mapped the city’s privatised beaches as well as the places where illegal sewage dumping takes place, and it has shared this research with the institutions tasked with enforcing a healthy sea.

“Corporations fail to pay the full social and environmental costs of doing business”

Unemployment is another legacy for the working-class communities of Bagnoli, which grew rapidly after the steelworks opened in 1912, and would later employ 12,000 workers. This amounts to over twice the quarter of Bagnoli’s current estimated population of 21,773.

Naples today is the capital of the Campania region, which has Italy’s highest unemployment rate at 17.4 per cent.

“This is a very poor area today,” Lorenzo Lodato, another local says about Bagnoli. “There is little work, no manufacturing or tourism. We have nothing.”

After the steelworks shut, the state made grand promises to decontaminate and regenerate Bagnoli. Little materialised. Some efforts made things worse, costing millions in public money. For instance, a state-owned municipal company called Bagnoli Futura that took over most of the industrial site in 2005 collapsed eight years later. In 2013, investigators discovered this company was not decontaminating Bagnoli at all, but instead spreading the pollutants across a wider area in Bagnoli.

David Whyte, a professor of climate justice at Queen Mary, University of London, explains how this story is repeated the world over: “Corporations don’t have to pay for the ecological and environmental damage they cause, nor the chaos in which they leave communities. The corporation as an accounting entity has a particular status in profit and loss, which are only measured in very narrow terms. They don’t include the full costs of doing business, and those costs are borne by the community. So, in many ways, the corporation itself…is based on this idea that it is never going to pay the full social and environmental costs of business. This is not just normal, it is baked into a capitalist economy that is dominated by corporations that have those privileges to wreak damage wherever they go and never pay for it through costs.”

Whyte points to further examples such as oil multinationals BP and Shell’s devastation of the Niger Delta and Texaco and Chevron’s impact on Ecuador: “The levels of exploitation are worse and more widespread in the Global South, but it is precisely the same process.”

Naples’ urban commons

Raggia and Lodata participate in a self-managed space called Lido Pola, once an abandoned restaurant and bathing area near the polluted beach. It is now one of Naples’ urban commons – formally recognised in Naples city’s law – self-organised through weekly assemblies for and by the local communities. Locals occupied Lido Pola in 2013, as a focal point to demand access to a healthy seaside. It is a space for everyone, hosting social, educational, recreational and political activities and mutual aid.

“Lido Pola is a space to rethink Bagnoli,” Raggia says. “In town, it is just streets [rather than public spaces]. From Lido Pola we share through culture and politics. I’m a painter, and it offers artists a space to showcase their work. This space is for working-class people, as you do not need to pay to use it.”

Lodata adds: “We host many meetings with locals, other commoners and international visitors coming to Naples. We connect with schools and academic research and also with local associations. For instance, one [local group] is installing lighting to basketball courts in Bagnoli as public services are so underfunded.”

Lido Pola is at Bagnoli’s east end. West and nearer Bagnoli’s centre, there is another urban commons, Villa Medusa, a former mansion built before Bagnoli’s industrialisation. Later abandoned, it went through a similar process, occupied by locals in 2013 and formally recognised in 2016 in Naples city law as an urban commons, a space co-ordinated by weekly open public assemblies.

In Villa Medusa people co-create mutual aid, social initiatives, recreational and political activities and learning, including its self-managed library. Other activities range from carpentry to dancing. Villa Medusa is also a space for associations and social movements offering support for workers, including a helpdesk for workers suffering exploitation and an office of the Unemployed Movement 7 November: a grassroots group of those without jobs that began in Bagnoli on that date in 2014, and which fights for decent work for all.

Villa Medusa is also where the Popular Observatory of Bagnoli meets, a social movement of Bagnoli residents. “It is focused on monitoring the decontamination phase and advocating in the new plans for the former industrial site. This includes making the authorities include social contracts for Bagnoli to create employment for Bagnoli,” Dario Oropallo explains. He is a participant in Villa Medusa, as well as post-graduate humanities student at University of Naples “L’Orientale”.

Oropallo was also involved in the 2023 film Flegrea – Un Futuro per Bagnoli (Flegrea – A Future for Bagnoli). This award-winning movie depicts the challenges of living in Bagnoli, shown by two siblings from Bagnoli and features the Observatory as a tool of participative democratic power.

The Observatory meets regularly, creating social events to mobilise and share information across Bagnoli, holding press conferences and using other means to build awareness of what is happening more broadly. It also intervenes and pressurises the city and other authorities to keep their promises to decontaminate and create an ecologically healthy Bagnoli.

Oropallo continues: “The Observatory’s main aim is to depollute and build up a new Bagnoli in the area of Italsider, imposing good job conditions and a strong heritage.”

Professor Whyte, who authored the 2020 book Ecocide: Kill the Corporation Before It Kills Us, asserts: “The dice are loaded against devastated communities and for the corporation, but ultimately the only power for change lies in people. We have a system which is set up to produce pollution, where corporations are probably the main pollutants, states support them in that enterprise. Who can change that? Our only solution is to organise in our communities and workplaces.”

Rosario Nasti from Mare Libero explains how this organising and mobilising is bound in rethinking our relationship with the ocean: “Our idea is that the sea should not be considered solely for economic uses like industry and tourism. Its value is beyond consumption. It is about public health, both mental and physical. This is an environmental, cultural and social struggle.”