Tourists beware: if it's fun, Italy has a law against it.

Head for the beach or a park bench without knowing the rules, writes
Peter Popham, and you could come home with a hefty fine

Sunday, 17 August 2008

In addition to the usual perils of sunburn, jellyfish attacks and
bottom-pinching, holidaymakers in Italy face a new range of menaces this
summer, the result of the Berlusconi government's frontal assault on
what it calls the "security emergency".

The nation's mayors have been given carte blanche to write laws to
address their own particular security hang-ups. The result is a blizzard
of new rules and regulations that threatens to turn the bel paese into
the biggest nanny state of them all.

Unwary foreigners risk getting hefty fines for doing things that are
perfectly legal everywhere in the world except the particular town or
city where they find themselves.

In Genoa, for example, it is now against the law to walk around with a
bottle of wine or can of beer in your hand. In Rome that is okay, but if
you stretch out under a pine tree or on the Spanish Steps to drink it,
or merely to eat a sandwich, your "indecorous" behaviour may be
penalised. Likewise if your al fresco snack is followed by a nap.

Stiff regulations are aimed at beach-goers: on one beach in Olbia,
Sardinia, smokers risk a €360 (£280) fine, while nationwide, the
minister of welfare has imposed a ban on massages offered by immigrants,
warning of the possible dangerous effects of "aesthetic or therapeutic
services" offered by those "not in possession of adequate training or
competence".

At Eraclea, near Venice, parents need to keep a beady eye on their
children: sandcastles are banned, as they "obstruct the passage" along
the beach. Racketball and other ball games are forbidden on many
beaches, and swimmers who dive heedlessly into the sea may face whopping
fines if they are not in "permitted areas".

And woe betide holidaymakers in many seaside towns who wander away from
the beach clad only in boxers or bikinis: it's against the law.

The nationwide witch-hunt against the vendors of counterfeit designer
bags has been fortified in Ostia, Rome's most popular beach, by the use
of patrolling helicopters, making the Italian beach experience even more
hellish than usual.

Away from the water, things don't get any easier. Two people may sit
down on a park bench in the city of Novara, but if a third person joins
them and it's after 11pm, all three are breaking the law. In Viareggio
the benches may contain as many people as care to squeeze on to them,
but if one of them puts his feet up on it he risks a fine. Scatter
breadcrumbs for pigeons in the city of Lucca and you could end up
hundreds of euros poorer.

The drive against begging has been taken up by many towns – including
Assisi, home of St Francis, who began his religious life as a mendicant.
In the romantic city of Verona they have taken this trend to its logical
conclusion, requiring the beggars' takings to be confiscated. And in
Florence it is now illegal to clean the windscreens of cars waiting at
traffic lights.

Silvio Berlusconi's government may be the first in the world to have
introduced a "minister of simplification" , with the job of identifying
and abolishing redundant laws, but in the interests of greater local
democracy and security his interior minister, Roberto Maroni, has
allowed a thousand legal flowers to bloom.

Most of them will probably never be enforced, but that will be scant
consolation to the pigeon-feeder whose holiday souvenirs include a large
fine.

http://www.independ ent.co.uk/ news/world/ europe/tourists- beware-if- its-
fun-italy-has- a-law-against- it-899787. html