A woman walks between uncollected garbage pushed into the middle of the streets Friday in Naples' Sanita' neighborhood, southern Italy, in what reports said was a provocation by residents to authorities for garbage collection to resume. About 20 effigies representing city officials were found hanging on lampposts and trees in Naples on Friday, the latest protest over a garbage crisis that has left streets lined with trash.

Naples, Italy ? Stinking mounds of garbage piled up on the streets of Naples on Friday and officials around the country blamed organized crime and bureaucratic red tape for the city’s refuse crisis.

Effigies of city officials, suspended from lampposts and trees, reflected the fury of Naples’ citizens, who have had to live amid small mountains of their own refuse since Dec. 21, when collectors stopped gathering it because there was nowhere to take it.

Residents have resorted to setting trash on fire, raising fears of toxic smoke.

“Garbage is piling up outside our building,” said Angela Sepe, a Neapolitan walking on the outskirts of the city. “I don’t go downstairs anymore to throw it away but throw it out the window because the garbage has already reached” as high as the second-floor window.

Naples and other parts of the southern Campania region have been plagued by a series of garbage crises for more than a decade. Dumps fill up and local communities block efforts to build new ones or create temporary storage sites. In 2004, a garbage crisis prompted weeks of protests.

Some protesters hurled stones Friday evening at a police station in the Pianura neighborhood on Naples’ outskirts, where work has begun to reopen a long-closed dump, the Italian news agencies Apcom and ANSA reported. One protester was arrested following the attack, which left windows at the station broken, the reports said.

Four empty buses were set afire overnight in the same neighborhood, fire officials said.

About 100 young protesters marched Friday on City Hall. Some occupied a central balcony and the roof, where they hung banners protesting the reopening of the dump and demanding a full-fledged plan to improve recycling in the area, the ANSA and Apcom news agencies reported.

Local, regional and national officials handed out blame for the southern city’s chronic inability to properly dispose of its trash.

Several lawmakers said the government’s creation in 1994 of a special office of trash commissioner to deal with Naples’ continuing garbage crisis was part of the problem.