In Naples, Italy, Crying Foul Over Reports of Cockroaches NAPLES, Italy - It began with ominous reports of an invasion of oversize red cockroaches, the American type, which were not only driving out the native Neapolitan black cockroaches but also possibly carrying deadly diseases. It did not matter that city and health officials scoffed at the reports. The summer - high season for cockroaches and bottom-of-the-barrel stories in the Italian news media - was upon the land, and the story could not be squelched, no matter how many entomologists protested. The media hype helped fuel a maelstrom of alarm, indignation and some jokes, not to mention a minor diplomatic spat with the Aeolian Islands to the south, identified by some Neapolitan officials as the source of the red bugs. "Everyone who comes to Naples wants to stay," even cockroaches, said one middle-aged Neapolitan woman on a busy central square who declined to give her name. Naples's mayor, Luigi de Magistris, insisted in a pugnacious interview posted on his Facebook page that there was no emergency, and said that the city's lawyers had been told to legally pursue any news outlet that damaged the city's image (not an easy task in a place infamous for organized crime and piles of uncollected garbage). Mr. de Magistris, who was elected just over a year ago, went a step further, intimating that the cockroach report was part of a sly, occult design to discredit the city and its political class. In the mayor's reading of things, the progress his administration has made in cleaning up Naples has gotten under some people's skin. "I don't want to get too long-winded about this, but this is a topic that dates back to 1861, the topic of the unification of Italy, the relationship between north and south," Mr. de Magistris said in the interview. Some people are bothered that a decision-making class is emerging in Naples. To the occasional visitor, downtown Naples seemed remarkably insect-free on a recent, sweltering afternoon, and shopkeepers along the Via Chiaia, a well-kept central pedestrian thoroughfare, concurred that the cockroach alarm had been widely overblown. Other locals said they had heard about, but not necessarily seen, flying cockroaches in several neighborhoods. Nevertheless, the hard feelings stirred up by the reports were proving far more difficult to contain than the seemingly mythical cockroach infestation. Mayors of towns in the Aeolian Islands, off the Sicilian coast, collectively protested last week when one Neapolitan health official suggested that the islands were the source of the red cockroaches. Weekly boat connections between ports had facilitated the migration, the official surmised. "It's ridiculous, but no laughing matter," said Marco Giorgianni, the mayor of Lipari, a town on the island of the same name. He said that after newscasts cited the Aeolians as the birthplace of the bugs, the mayors there received thousands of phone calls and many tourists canceled their holidays. "We live off tourism, so a stupid comment like saying that Aeolian cockroaches have colonized Naples can become a tragedy," Mr. Giorgianni said. Lipari did have red cockroaches, he added, "but no more than in any other city. It's not a problem here. Entomologists in Italy are perplexed that the bugs ever got noticed at all. "Every city has cockroaches, and in hot periods they increase their population, but it's not a new problem," said Piero Cravedi, director of the Institute of Entomology and Plant Pathology at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Piacenza. While ships have been singled out as the likely vehicles for insect travel throughout the world for centuries, "it would be easier for Naples to infest Lipari, rather than the other way around," Professor Cravedi said. The uproar was made more acute, perhaps, after the red cockroaches were identified as an American type, and described as having cannibalized the black cockroaches indigenous to Naples. "They ate them up, destroying the native species - it was a battle of the fittest," said Maria Triassi, a professor in the department of preventive medicine at the Federico II University here, who is not an entomologist but whose concerns were much repeated in the Italian news media, helping to ignite the hysteria. Entomologists say that different species of cockroaches have cohabited throughout the world for quite some time without any disastrous effects. "We can't ascribe any particular responsibility to the Americans: it's the name of the species, but they've been endemic to Europe for centuries," Professor Cravedi said. I'd exclude that they are newcomers. Health authorities in Naples regularly disinfect the city's gutters and sewers at night; last week, they began disinfecting some neighborhoods during the day as well. Neapolitans are justly renowned for their ingenuity, said Anna Fusco, who works in a tobacco shop near the San Carlo Opera House, so many had already taken the situation into their own hands. "As with all things, we organize ourselves in Naples," she said. Where people live, they've been cleaning their own stoops and throwing disinfectant on the ground. The alarm, exaggerated or not, is a source of concern for city administrators who, like Mayor de Magistris, are anxious to shed the image of a chaotic and unclean city presented to the world's news media during the trash crisis of recent years. "After years of bad government, the city has been raising its head again, forging a new international image," said Marzia Bonacci, a spokeswoman for the mayor. To make us sink anew is to deny how this city is changing. "No one who lives in the city would avow that problems don't exist, but cockroaches are not among them," said Luigi Savastan, a newspaper vendor on the Via Chiaia, citing the city's high unemployment figures that serve to swell the ranks of Naples's notorious organized crime families. Naples, it's an open-air theater, a nonstop performance. And the cockroach alarm? "It's just folklore," he said.