Giovanni Marchitelli has something to show Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi when Italy's leader arrives Wednesday: a month's worth of garbage piled next to his pizzeria. Marchitelli, 64, hopes that Berlusconi will force local officials to solve the continuing problem due to full landfills, or his family's pizzeria will be out of business. "We can't stand to work anymore because of the garbage smell," he says. "People won't stop and eat because of the garbage." Perhaps worse than the smell and the flies, he says, is when vigilantes burn garbage at night, leaving an acrid smell many mornings around Naples. Uncollected garbage has turned many streets and alleys around this once-beautiful Mediterranean seaport of more than 3 million people into an open dump on many days. Berlusconi, who became Italy's prime minister for a third time after last month's general election, is meeting here with his Cabinet for the first time to keep a campaign pledge to solve the festering crisis. The problem is one of several he is tackling as Italy faces one of the worst economic growth rates in the European Union and chronically high unemployment. The mounting trash prompted the European Union's executive commission to launch legal action against Italy this month for creating a threat to the environment and human health. 'We're very worried' Jennifer Burns, a professor at the University of Warwick in England, says Naples' garbage crisis is a "hugely important." "It's symbolic. You've got to clean up your own rubbish," she says. The U.S. ambassador to Italy, Ronald Spogli, warned that Americans and other tourists could be frightened away unless the mess is cleaned up "once and for all." The U.S. military in Naples announced this week that it is sampling tap water and soil to determine whether people stationed here are being exposed to pollutants from the uncollected garbage. Around the corner from Naples' City Hall, any fragrance wafting from Maria Rosaria Virniechi's flower shop is overwhelmed by the stench of week-old kitchen scraps seeping from bags tossed from apartments into the street. South of Naples, Salvatore Esposito eyes a mound of rubbish in an underpass next to the grocery where he works. Rain-soaked bags of food scraps and diapers have leached into puddles beneath the mound of boxes, old computer keyboards and discarded clothes that have accumulated. "We're very worried," says Esposito, 40. "Summer is coming. We've already got very big rats." Naples' garbage crisis became international news in December, when the region's landfills were full. That was the culmination of 14 years of inaction by local officials, corruption that involved the Camorra organized crime syndicate's grip on trash collection, and residents' complaints of not wanting new landfills or incinerators nearby. A former Naples regional president, Antonio Bassolino, and 27 others are on trial accused of defrauding the region in trash-removal contracts from 2000 to 2004. He denies any wrongdoing. A new incineration plant not far from Marchitelli's roadside pizzeria, about 24 miles east of Naples, remains unopened because of a shortage of money and health concerns about emissions. Shortly before Christmas, then-prime minister Romano Prodi sent the Italian army to bulldoze away the garbage. He announced construction of three incinerators, urged other regions to take the trash and named a new trash commissioner to oversee the problem until the April election. 5 tons a minute Sales of the region's famed buffalo mozzarella cheese