Around here, if you try to build a pool or a fountain, or even set up a gazebo in your garden without the green light from the local authorities, they’ll make you tear it down. And just because you happen to be ignorant of local building regulations is no excuse.
Norah is a digital nomad from London with a cottage in Rome’s countryside. She recently had to dismantle a gazebo she had set up in the garden due to lack of permits. She was devastated. “I had no idea that there were landscape restrictions,” she said. Her house lies close to a protected natural reserve where archaeological ruins were found decades ago. She learned this the hard way.
As is so often the case, the neighbours were the culprit. Annoyed by the daily noise of work in her garden, they reported her to the local police office.
When the cops came round, she was ordered to demolish it. That single visit cost her €8,000. I felt really bad for her, especially as her neighbours had shopped her to the police.
Dan, a pensioner from Leeds, has a farmhouse near Carmagnola, in rural Piedmont, and he ran into a similar, albeit more expensive problem when he decided one spring day to build a 14-metre-long swimming pool. He has joint pain and thought that a daily swim might help.
He hired a building company, had them dig a 4m-deep curaçao blue pool with stone borders, and in less than two weeks he was already doing his daily lengths.
It was lovely – until a police agent came knocking on his door.
“The agent told me his office had received an anonymous call from a resident living near my house who had complained about the loud noise in my front yard,” he told me.
Dan said he had no idea that Italian law could be so cruel: the agent ordered him immediately to remove the pool, fill the hole back in with soil, cover it with grass, and file the paperwork needed to build a “legal” one.
Following the demolition, his garden looked as if it had been bombed: the huge ugly pit had been filled with the worst kind of soil, full of bits of glass bottles, chicken bones and old fragments of floor tiles that stuck out of the ground.
“The company I hired to tear the pool down probably took the soil from a graveyard or an abandoned patch of land. It’s disgusting.”
This whole adventure cost Dan some €30,000 to build the pool, plus a further €7,000 to have it removed. Now, if he decides to file the necessary application to the local authorities to get authorisation, it will cost him another €30,000 to have it all rebuilt.
“I’m considering ditching the pool plan, and perhaps even selling the house and looking for another property closer to the beach, in Liguria”, he told me.
I don’t blame him.
It struck me that what really upset these expats, more than seeing an expensive project being smashed up before their eyes, was the neighbours’ role. And that is partly the result of a cultural clash.
In small, rural Italian communities everyone looks out for each other, but this also has a downside. It means people tend to talk, gossip, and blow the whistle on naive foreigners who think living the Italian dream is an easy ride.
That upsets me, too, but it’s an aspect of Italian society and mentality that everyone needs to come to terms with – including all the expats.
Silvia Marchetti is a freelance writer living in Rome
