There ought to be a law, you say? In Italy, now there is!
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Nope - that's not what smells like octopus
Residents complained about a married couple in their block cooking up vats of rich pasta sauces and “fritti misti” or mixed fried seafood, a dish that is as beloved to Italians as fish and chips are to the British.
The squabble first ended up in a court in the town of Gorizia, where the couple who cooked the offending food were found guilty of anti-social behaviour.
They appealed to a higher court in the nearby city of Trieste, which in turn upheld the sentence. Not content with that decision, they then took the case all the way to the Court of Cassation in Rome, which after much deliberation upheld the rulings of the two lower courts.
The judges in Rome said the couple’s enthusiastic cooking resulted in “the emission of odours and noises in the overhead apartment on the third floor,” owned by another couple. The smells were so strong that they were “beyond the limits of tolerability” and constituted what the court called “olfactory molestation”.
One of the neighbours complained that when the couple were cooking, “the whole of my apartment became impregnated with the smell of the pasta sauce and the fried fish. It felt like their kitchen was in my flat.”
The Court of Cassation dismissed the offending couple’s earlier appeals and ordered them to pay a fine of 2,000 euros.
Disputes over cooking smells are frequent in apartment blocks, said Matteo Santini, a lawyer who specializes in quarrels between neighbours. Some claim compensation for having to move residence, while others claim they suffer depression and even psychological trauma from the waft of cooking odours.
“The courts have to strike the right balance (between people creating the smells and those complaining about them). There was a man who wanted to prosecute his neighbour because she cooked chicken soup at eight in the morning,” Mr Santini told La Repubblica newspaper.
Hey, works for me. Years ago, Pal Nancy and I rented our lower level "elderly conversion unit" to an otherwise-very-nice German woman, who'd cook sauerkraut and sausages at 10 at night, filling our own living quarters with odors otherwise found only in Baveria. We never had the heart to evict her, but the idea of having the police kick in her door and drag her to the hoosegow might have been delicious enough to overcome my softiness.
Love to see this adopted in, say NYC: it'd be another one of those lawyer-full-employment measures, and God knows they need it.
