Italian bureaucracy doesn’t kill, but it can drive you mad. Ask the local Town Hall for a construction permit. Pay. Collect the construction permit. Pay. Construct. You are about to move into your house and the Province notices that the Town Hall made a mistake. The house has to be demolished. And so that you’re not missing out on anything, the Prosecutors Office enters your name in the register of those under investigation. So you learn from being Italian. All this happened in Dolcedo, in the Province of Imperia. Beppe Grillo

Interview with Paola Borsellino, an Arpal inspector

A mortgage to get your house destroyed
Greetings to the friends of Beppe Grillo’s blog. I’m Paola Borsellino and we are here in Dolcedo in the Province of Imperia. Dolcedo is a tiny town with about 1400 inhabitants in the hills above Imperia, 7 Km from the sea and I and another 70 citizens are finding ourselves living this Kafkaesque story as we bought homes or we are having homes built either as our main residence or as a second home, given the splendid position where we are. After a few years when our homes were practically finished, we found in our hands a useless piece of paper, because first the Province of Imperia, then the town of Dolcedo made out that the construction permit that had been issued by the town of Dolcedo was illegitimate and now we find ourselves with demolition orders, and we are lost in the middle of decisions from the TAR administrative court, criminal denunciations and appeals with the Council of State. As you can see we are in a zone that is pretty much untouched, where there are olive trees and very little urbanization, this land all comes within the agricultural zone. An agricultural zone means that the Region specifies that there are buildings with a sparsely scattered character. For us, this sparsely scattered character meant that we had to respect the limits laid down in the offical planning schedule for the town. We put in requests to the Town Hall asking if we could build with the characteristics that were dictated to us by the Town Hall. We got permission to construct from the Town Hall. We did the building of our homes and only after a few years we were told that there was a mistake. That these homes could not have been built. For us, this is an anomaly, because according to us, all the Province of Imperia falls within the E3 zone, the agricultural zone, and it has constructions that are similar to ours. In fact, they are often more densely packed. The distances required by the Town Hall, have been respected. A State cannot take away a home from someone who has built it while respecting the rules given and then change the rules once the game has been played. How can you have trust in a State that considers its own documents to be pieces of waste paper that can be torn to pieces from one day to another!
The State tells you: “We have made a mistake”

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