Naples awoke Friday to the now-familiar smell of smouldering rubbish after a night in which the fire brigade had to put out dozens of fires.
Four city buses were burned as exasperation at the city's week-long trash crisis reached a peak.
In a macabre threat, 21 tailor's dummies bearing death notices for Regional Governor Antonio Bassolino and City Mayor Rosa Russo Jervolino were strung up across a city-centre street.
Demonstrators loosened a blockade of a long-closed refuse dump in the Pianura suburb which authorities are struggling to get working again.
But citizens' road-blocks slowed truck traffic into the site down to a trickle.
Environment Minister Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio accused the local Mafia, the Camorra, of stoking up the crisis to get rid of toxic waste, one of the crime syndicate's most lucrative activities.
''In this carefully orchestrated chaos the Mafia always comes out on top,'' he said.
With an estimated 100,000 tons of trash lying in the streets of Naples and the surrounding area, the European Union has warned it could act against Italy unless it solves the problem quickly.
A special commissioner appointed by the government decided to ease the situation by taking the refuse to the Pianura site, making the old trash dump the focal point of the current emergency.
The 40 or so fresh fires - after 75 on Wednesday night - have worsened health risks as the burning trash releases poisonous dioxins into the air.
The latest emergency comes after two refuse storage sites in the Campania region were closed over the New Year because they were overflowing.
Authorities, who face public protests every time they select new sites, have been unable to find replacement landfills and treatment plants.
A failure to organise recycling schemes, coupled with the problems finding new destinations for the Campania region's rubbish, has meant the area has faced recurrent trash emergencies over the last decade.
Centre-right politicians renewed calls Friday for Bassolino and Jervolino to resign while government parties called for swift action to avert further harm to Italy's image.
