Village life (IV)

Living in the countryside does not mean being eco-friendly in one's behavior. If you stroll around the fields you find a lot of places that the local wine growers use as makeshift dumps for construction waste. Some also leave empty herbicide and pesticide plastic containers there.
As there is virtually no public transport for short distances - except for the train (for middle distances)- everybody who works outside the village needs a car. That means two to three cars for a lot of families. The problem is that the village was built in pre-automotive days, the streets are narrow, and there is only limited parking space. On weekends, when most people are at home and the owners of second homes come to the village, traffic gets quite dense and parking becomes nearly impossible. Another problem is that most villagers either cannot or do not want to spend a lot of money on a car, which means that the local fleet is quite old; and there are some cars that might hail from pre-catalysator days with the resulting exhaust fumes...
There are other factors that influence negatively on air-quality. Tractors are diesel-engine powered and the engineers of Fiat Agri and the likes do not seem to pay too much attention on reducing fume and noise emissions. Another point is that a lot of houses rely on open fire places and wood-fuelled stoves for heating. The problem here is that some seem to burn whatever they find (judging from the smells) and that few houses have adequate filters for the fumes.
The good thing is that one can usually walk out into the fields and enjoy the fresh country air there - if one does not do it on a foggy day with a farmer burning his waste, as the fumes stick around underneath the fog...