Whether it’s the smell of boiled broccoli wafting down a stairwell or cigarette butts flicked off a balcony, these days it takes very little to trigger a furious row between talian neighbours.
“Something has changed —the courts are backed up with flat owners suing each otherover the sound of high heels on parquet,” said Giuseppe Bica, the head of Anammi, Italy’s biggest association of building managers.
Fifteen per cent of Anammi’s 13,000 members have reported being on the end of verbal or physical assaults by residents this year — a sharp rise on previous years. Fights often end up in court, with half of all civil cases in Italy prompted by rows between neighbours.
“When one manager in Naples pointed out to a flatowner that his bike was blocking an entrance, the owner broke two of his fingers,” said Bica.
More than ever, Italy’s army of often-maligned building managers are forced to keep the peace. In a country where 70 percent live in apartment buildings, and where any block with eight or more flats must by law hire a manager to handle maintenance and decorum, coexistence has always been tense, with bickering common at residents’ meetings.
Increasingly bad behaviour is fuelling the fighting. Bica said, “Graffiti is a growing problem. In one building someone painted a series of increasingly explicit sex scenes up the lift shaft, which you could see through the cage of the lift as you rose to the top floor, where the sex act was consummated.”
Despite the assault in Naples, Bica said feuding was most common in Milan in northern Italy. “Everyone is clued up on the law there which makes them keener to start legal battles,” he said.
Managers report 45 per cent of feuding occurs in the north, with 35 per cent in central Italy including Rome,which made the headlines in 2022 when an aggrieved resident walked into a meeting of 30 of his neighbours and opened fire with a Glock pistol.
Claudio Campiti, who had refused to pay his share of housing bills, yelled, “I will kill you all” and fatally shotthree women before he was overpowered. “He was taking aim at the building manager
when his pistol jammed,” said Luiga Frezza, a manager who of two colleagues in Rome’s middle-class Gianicolense neighbourhood.
Frezza blamed the breakdown in civility on the months of lockdown during the pandemic. “The isolation put distance between people and they cannot and don’t want to restart relationships,” she said.
Listing the top reasons for shouting at meetings, Frezza started with cigarette butts thrown off balconies, watering devices for plants leaking water onto lower balconies and flying crumbs as people shake tablecloths out of windows. “At meetings it all comes out and we’re in the middle,” she said.
Food smells accentuate cultural differences. Eastern Europeans have been castigated for cooking with excess garlic; Bangladeshis have had complaints about spicy aromas.
“We tell managers to encourage residents to host dinners for neighbours so they can taste food they don’t know,” Bica said
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