Google Cam Skirts Streets of Gomorrah

Drug dealing streets of Scampia avoided as Google films districts of Naples for Street View

NAPLES – Today, you can see on your computer screen, so realistically that you might almost be there, the streets of the Bronx, the bainlieues of Paris, Amsterdam’s red light district or even Tepito, the stronghold of Mexico City’s drug trade. But you can’t see the Scampia district of Naples, Italy. Like Medellin, home of the Colombian narcos, the casbah of Algiers and the favelas of Rio de Janeiro, the Scampia district of Naples with its ugly high-rise housing, round-the-clock drug dealing and the last of the turf wars, between the Di Lauro gang and the “Secessionists”, is off-limits for Google Street View, the service that has put the rest of the planet just a mouse click away.

No one knows precisely why. No explanations are forthcoming from Google Italia. A spokesperson admits that “sometimes our cars don’t go into areas where the lanes are particularly narrow” but that is hardly the case with Scampia, whose streets are some of Naples’ widest. No other reasons are offered. “The service is run by our international department. We’ll have to ask them, which will take a few days”. We’ll find out all in good time, then, even though internet’s virtual reality has accustomed us to near-instant responses. In the meantime, Google Maps is online. Scampia is a blacked-out island in the middle of an area entirely covered by Street View. The satellite images are in place. You can pick out the sail-like “Vele” high-rise blocks, ill-famed Via Baku, where so many murders have taken place, and the blue-painted "Smurfs’ houses", where there are more dealers than residents. But the street-level pictures stop at Via Fratelli Cervi on one side and Via Labriola on the other, areas where the police are constantly making arrests but which are still on the outer edges of the urban decay.

Without any official explanation, it is not possible to say why. We can conjecture that the local gangs didn’t want a car going round filming everything and then posting it on the net. The criminals might have stopped the car, had a quiet word with the driver and camera operator and persuaded them to go somewhere else. But a quick check with the local police station rules this out. No Google operative has reported threats, nor has anyone requested a police escort, as usually happens with TV crews from Italy or abroad. The other possibility that comes to mind is that Google’s crew might have opted to steer clear of the area, even without threats, because they were rightly concerned about Scampia’s appalling reputation. But that argument holds only up to a point because Street View is available in districts like Palermo’s Zen and Brancaccio. It may not be available for Bari’s old town but the streets there really are narrow. It all comes back to Scampia. And, at least for now, it is a missed opportunity to show the district on the web. Scampia may be teeming with gangsters but it is also full of ordinary, decent people, parishes and schools, where residents go to work every day, just as they do in other parts of Naples.

English translation by Giles Watson

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