Which is the most litigious nation on this planet? I really don’t know the correct answer to this question except to suggest that the least litigious one may be somewhere on an island near the South Pole (not counting the quarrels between the penguins. But then there has to be some fight between the inhabitants and their naturally hostile environment.)

In a previous post I mentioned the three stages which may be gone through in Italy. These I defined as ‘Dream’, ‘Scream’ and ‘Cream’. In other, more direct words, they may be classified as love followed by hate and concluding with acceptance.

In the ‘scream’ bit litigation plays a very large part indeed. This quarrel may be mainly between a couple but in Italy things invariably spread to a wider field, literally. Eric Newby’s delightful book about his experiences with his holiday home in Tuscany’s Lunigiana is largely optimistic in tone but in the last chapter Newby admits that all has not been rosy during his stay. In particular, with his neighbour Eric had to fight a long battle over rights of way to his property. Despite strategically placing benches and flowerpots to delimit his territory Newby found that even these domestic items were constantly moved, removed and even damaged. Eventually a long and costly lawsuit ensued, the results of which were never fully clarified.

Lucky is the person in Italy who has purchased a property without territorial complications. Regrettably, I find few who are that fortunate. Mentioning no names for the obvious sake of privacy I find examples of persons who have had a property litigation suit virtually from day one. And if it wasn’t from day one it has been, in at least one case, from year five. Others have tried to make more logical sense of the land they have bought, often fragmented through generations of family members, into a more sensible whole, again without success. Others, even unluckier, have had access to their dream property cut off from the outside world and approachable only if they are paragliding experts. And so this litany of often absurd adversities continues. In my case I can only think of a mediaeval tithe of fifty ducats I’ve had to pay to the bishop of Lucca. I’m still waiting for him to turn up and claim his due and have even offered him a cup of tea but to-date have received no answer…  

However, I have heard of a story from another village in our otherwise idyllic Val di Lima that is so weird, so fraught with almost incredulous tortuousness, so unbelievable, so unutterably crazy that I thought it might be turned into a folktale for those who believe that even the slightest problems cannot be righted by a simple face-to-face encounter with the adversary over a glass of Aperol accompanied by nibbles..

This story of a horrendous Poesque nature, involving an international mafia, encompassing spiteful spirits, encapsulating more than one country and extending into the dark depth of the forces of order may make attention-grabbing reading for some of my readers during these oppressive days of Apuan misty gloom of an almost Thames-estuary-like-nature we are passing.

Hold your breath. The ghastly tale won’t start until my next post.