Around this time a woman named Anna Magri gave birth to Riccardo, her second son. When I met the 39-year-old car retailer in her neat flat in a village near Caserta, the boy’s tiny shoes were displayed alongside his picture on a dresser: he died shortly before his second birthday, having spent most of his short life fighting leukaemia discovered when he was six months old. “We thought he was teething which was why he was so upset, crying all the time. I was breastfeeding him but I could not pick him up because he would scream. He was in so much pain,” said his mother.

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Anna, who was pregnant during the 2007 rubbish crisis, remembers thick black smoke rising over her village from waste set alight on a nearby hill. “We did not think about the toxic waste issue because it had not come out yet,” she said. “I had seen fires all over the place, but now I know what they were. I am convinced his death was due to the toxic waste when it was burning, with all the illegal dumping.”

It will never be established whether her son was dealt a raw deal by fate or if his death was more sinister. One study, however, indicated significantly higher levels of dioxins in breast milk from mothers in the worst-afflicted area than from others living in surrounding areas. Other research has found worrying concentrations of dioxins and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in animal milk, even in the buffalos that produce the region’s famous mozzarella cheese. PCBs are man-made compounds once used widely in electrical products and are banned in many countries due to environmental and health concerns.

I asked Anna what she thought about the goons she believes killed her child, people she passed daily in the street. “They were stupid because they live here and their children live here too.” Yet this shocking saga goes far beyond the stupidity of greedy gangsters. The Italian state is guilty of at best grotesque and fatal incompetence, at worst a murderous cover-up in league with wealthy, tax-dodging industrialists that may have caused the deaths of at least 2,000 people already, according to one recent official study.

Schiavone claimed the worst offenders were the industrialists dealing with the mafia, since they knew the devastating damage of their deeds.

In 2004 there were more than twice as many known dumping sites in Campania than in the northern region of Lombardy; four years later, this number had more than doubled. The fires burned, but officials ignored them. One paediatrician showed me a map of these microdumps, each one a black dot, heavily clustered in the Triangle of Death zone around Acerra, Nola and Marigliano. Then he showed me another he had made with red dots denoting cases of child brain cancer overlaid on top; almost all overlapped in the same small area of the region.

Yet only now is the full extent of the scandal coming to light. Partly this is thanks to a campaigning local priest named Father Maurizio Patriciello, a former nurse who writes for the Italian bishops’ newspaper and enjoys stirring things up on social media. One hot night in June 2012 he could not sleep because of the smoke and stench of burning chemical waste, so he went on Facebook at three in the morning and asked if others were suffering the same effects. By six he had more than 1,000 responses from neighbouring villages, so he went to his bishop and demanded action.

“Families here are terrified,” the silver-haired, smooth-talking Catholic priest told me when we met in his church on a grim estate, watched intently by a gang of hooded men outside the heavy iron gates. “They know that even today there are so many sick people. They have to go for treatment in the north because hospitals here are full. If a woman asks for a mammogram they give it to her in three months, but if you wait that long it can be too late.”

Patriciello helped grieving parents such as Anna form protest groups, lobbied politicians in Rome, penned polemical articles, organised huge marches and joined with campaigners who sent pictures of mothers with their dead children to the Pope and Italian president. He even met Schiavone before the supergrass died two years ago, finding “an insignificant old man with white hair”. Patriciello claims that the gangster confessed his crimes to the priest, but claimed the worst offenders were the industrialists dealing with the mafia, since they knew the devastating damage of their deeds. It is hard to disagree.

It also emerged two years ago that the United States Navy, whose European command is based in Naples, had conducted its own three-year, $30 million study into the local air, soil and water. It tested hundreds of contaminated or alarming locations, finding high levels of ‘unacceptable health risk’ in private wells and worrying levels of uranium in 5 per cent of samples. It found there to be no impact on military personnel, but three areas near its base were placed off-limits, tap water was banned and troops were advised to avoid ground-floor flats, where the risk of inhaling contaminants was highest.

Thanks to the campaigners and hefty European Union fines for failing to combat illegal waste disposal, Italy’s politicians were finally prodded into action. Farming was banned around some contaminated sites. Then they passed a special Land of Fires act of parliament in 2014, which banned the burning of waste while putting extra cash into cancer detection and public health promotion in the region. Parliament also ordered the National Institute of Health to collect all available epidemiological evidence. An earlier study by the body had found a correlation between hazardous waste and health outcomes such as cancer mortality and birth malformations, but no direct cause.

They have poisoned our land and stolen our children.

The results of the inquiry, which looked into mortality, cancer incidence and hospital admissions in 55 municipalities, emerged earlier this year – and were devastating. Life expectancy in Campania two years lower than in the rest of the nation. Mortality rates in the Triangle of Death 10 per cent higher for men than elsewhere in the region, 13 per cent higher for women. More cancer cases in these bucolic rural areas than in the most contaminated industrial sites. These included a 17 per cent rise in cancers of the central nervous system for children under 14 around Naples – and a 51 per cent rise for infants in their first year, who are particularly vulnerable to environmental contamination because of their physiology.

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“It is not that every case is down to the toxic waste, but you can see a clear pattern,” said Pietro Comba, one of the authors of a report that directly blamed illegal dump sites and uncontrolled burning of waste. “There were particular signs with stomach, liver and lung cancer, plus breast cancer in women. And it was significant that these excesses are not uniform across the region. In many municipalities there is no departure from the norm, then it is very high in some others.”

Even these staggering findings offer only correlation, not proof of cause. But they add to a growing body of global evidence linking pollution to health problems: there’s incontrovertible evidence of ocular and central nervous system damage having been caused by the dumping of deadly toxic waste in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, in 2006, just as there are studies into contaminated waste dumps in Asian countries and the USA indicating impaired cognitive development. As Comba says, it is far harder to determine what causes a tumour to develop in a child’s brain than to find a link between asbestos and mesothelioma. “We have very strong evidence, but we cannot say with total certainty that this toxic waste is leading to child cancer.”