mountains as high as first-floor windows, the stench becomes unbearable - in this, the third-biggest city in Italy, one of Europe's economic superpowers.

The clan's construction businesses have burgeoned. They created brick pits, put together co-operatives of carpenters and bricklayers, built bitumen manufacturing companies - the growth was never-ending.

In their seminal investigation Biutiful Cauntri - the documentary that has told the story of what is now known as the "ecomafia" - the authors Esmeralda Calabria, Andrea d'Ambrosio and Peppe Ruggiero describe the origins of the waste crisis: "During the late 1980s and early 1990s, literally millions of cubic metres of sand were extracted illegally to make cement for reconstruction works … the enormous mines, caves and holes left behind ended up becoming the final destination for the millions of tonnes of hazardous waste that has been trucked cheaply from central and northern Italy and dumped in Naples."

As Nunzio Perella, one of the first cammoristi to turn informer, told investigators in 1992: "A munnezza e' oro [rubbish is gold]."

But for nearly a decade, Perella was not believed, his words dismissed as a disingenuous attempt to cover the millions made in illicit drug trafficking.

The strange thing about Casal di Principe, capital of the Camorra, is its ordinariness. Despite the billions made by its criminal owners through their poisonous mixture of big business and fear, the town exudes a down-at-heel boredom. If its bloody soul was not known, there would be little to engage the visitor, not a view, nothing. Casal is just one village of the hodgepodge splatter of townships, with names like Caivano, Casapesenna, San Cipriano d'Aversa, Villa Literno, Villa di Briano and Mariano, and each home to not more than 20,000 people.

These are places where everyone is related to someone with a clan connection. The young writer Roberto Saviano - author of the international blockbuster Gomorra , and a native of Casal, says it is a place where "even if you are not a part of it, you are a part of it". He grew up a part of this fabric, an observer who has had the courage to write what he saw - and now lives with clan threats against his life and wanders from home to home under police guard. This is a town where nearly 3000 people are kept under police surveillance because of prior convictions or known affiliation with the clan.

But behind Casal's suburban facade, inside the closed doors and locked steel shutters, lies another world, one of marble bathrooms and gilt taps, of swimming pools, enormous terraces, hidden rooms, walled gardens and underground bunkers.

Six days ago, in the suffocating 38 degree heat of a premature summer, Casal's main street unexpectedly became host to a who's who of the southern Italian anti-Mafia hierarchy. Spilling on to nondescript Via Umberto was a sea of elegant men, their eyes covered by Ray-Ban sunglasses, their bodies screened constantly by armed bodyguards. The danger of their positions was made evident in the still air as sweat soaked through shirts revealing outlines of bulletproof vests. Locals, nearly all men, mingled with uniformed carabinieri, their blue and white squad cars parked at angles to block off the street.

Inside the gates is a house containing 14 rooms, spanning three floors of 170 square metres each. The house was owned by a mid-ranking Camorra boss, Dante Apicella, but the Naples anti-Mafia directorate seized it and transformed it into a home for a new 30-strong posse of specialist officers dedicated to stopping the bloodshed and hunting down the remaining 30 fugitives of the Casalese clan.

Church and state are intertwined in Italy, and as police placed their hands on hearts, the Bishop of the diocese of Aversa, Mario Milano, blessed the entrance with holy water. "I bless the young purveyors of the law and of peace who will confront, with force, the low life who pollute the name of the Casalese people."

Later, outside in the villa's garden, the chief of Naples's anti-Mafia directorate, Franco Roberti, told the Herald the new unit had three goals: to stop the bloodshed, capture the remaining fugitives and help reinvest assets seized from the clans for the good of the innocent.

That night, just a stone's throw away from the villa-turned-police station, Roberti's men uncovered a bunker constructed deep beneath the workshop of a small aluminium window frame manufacturer. Tiled, well-lit, complete with bathrooms and working kitchen, it is just one of the honeycomb of shelters used to shield fugitive clan men from the law.

There are thousands of ordinary, God-fearing working men and women with babies and grandparents and mouths to feed in these regions. These are innocent citizens, unembroiled in what has happened around them, but forced to live in the stench of garbage, in endemic criminality and in terror of violence. The scatter of Casertano towns should have been well planned and well built, exploiting their economic proximity to the natural beauty and commercial focus of Naples as well as the seaside of the Domitian coast.

Scattered between Naples and Rome, surrounded by vineyards, fields, home to the buffalo herds that provide milk for the world famous mozzarella, they should be bustling, healthy agricultural societies growing and nurtured by the fecund fields fed by lava and nestled on the peripheries of the foot of the world's most beautiful volcano. Instead, they have become hellholes, mired in their own waste, their fields poisoned by the toxic dumping by Camorra transport companies, some even nicknamed the Fields of Fire, places that still choke in the toxic black smoke sent billowing when the clans poured flame accelerators into the rubbish mountains to clear space for ever more illegal dumping.

Others, like Scampia, home of the infamous public housing towers known as le Vele (the Sails) are scenes out of a Hieronymous Bosch nightmare, urban wastelands where Camorra lure their young mules and addicts come to score the EU's cheapest high-grade heroin and cocaine.

On Tuesday, Silvio Berlusconi and his army of advisers descended on Naples, part of the Prime Minister's pre-election pledge to visit the southern capital weekly until the rubbish crisis is resolved. Flanked by the mayors of seven local towns, he promised, again, that a new high-grade incinerator would be complete by April. But he could not help aiming a florid - and unhelpful - broadside at the 6000 poor souls who actually collect garbage in Naples: workers, he said, who "head to the beach on Sundays" instead of working seven days a week. The army boasted it had shifted 8762 tonnes of rubbish in just one day. But behind the TV cameras Berlusconi loves and owns - in the streets and lanes and piazzas - another 20,000 tonnes of rubbish remain putrefying.

On our way out of town, we stop at Bar Morza for a last quick coffee. But the Aussie-loving old man is not there and his son - the proprietor - is out the front. His eyes spot the photographer's camera and the big lens.

One wordless look from him and it's clear it is time to go.

Paola Totaro is the Herald's European correspondent. Ugly life imitating brutal art IT IS a street like any other in Casal Di Principe, modest houses on either side, the occasional garden, neat courtyards. But this is no ordinary street. Behind an enormous rust-coloured gate at the very end of Via Cecco Angioleri lies what has long been known to locals as "Ollywood", the villa of Walter Schiavone, brother of one of the Casalese clan's most powerful Mafia bosses.

The mansion is now blackened with soot, its grand marble staircases, myriad terrazzos, enormous bedrooms and sumptuous bathrooms destroyed by Schiavone's henchmen. After his arrest, Schiavone decided that if he couldn't enjoy his home, nobody would. He sent in a semi-trailer load of tyres with orders to burn the place down, room by room.

What is left, however, is startlingly familiar: Schiavone had his dream home designed as an exact replica of the Miami mansion of Tony Montana, the fictional Cuban gangster played by Al Pacino in the 1983 movie Scarface . There are the enormous Corinthian columns at the entry hall, sweeping double staircases and the infamous bathtub once mounted on plinths and serviced by a tap modelled on a golden lion's head. The tub is now leaning against a wall, its fixtures long gone. But the English-style garden is still there, as is the swimming pool, hidden behind enormous palm trees, a wall of bougainvillea and creepers.

There's an enormous blackened and twisted telescope which remains mounted on the roof terrazzo like some sentinel from a nightmare. What use did Schiavone make of it? To keep a look out for his enemies, or to stare at the stars?

The mansion is just one - and the oldest - of 75 assets confiscated from arrested Camorra families over the past 10 years. All have been handed over to Agrorinasce, a specialist agency which works with the four surrounding municipalities to redevelop and reuse the properties for the common good.

The Scarface villa has now been handed over to the University of Aversa's architecture faculty, which is redesigning it as a centre for rehabilitation and sport for disabled people. Down the road, the villa of another clan boss, Egidio Coppola, is destined to become a halfway house for children awaiting permanent placement and foster homes. It will be named Casa Diana in honour of the priest, Don Peppino Diana, who campaigned against the Camorra and was murdered for his troubles.

Giovanni Allucci, the director of Agrorinasce, holds the keys to the confiscated properties and is passionate about transforming them from symbols of evil to assets serving the common good.

As he walked us through the once grand reception hall, he reminded us that what we were seeing was built on the blood of policemen, of murdered magistrates, of courageous priests and hundreds of ordinary citizens who had dared defy the Camorra, and had not lived to tell the tale.