A row over land takes Italy back to the Middle Ages
When property rights depend on long-dead popes
TROUBLE HAS been brewed on Mount Circeo, south of Rome, ever since it was home to Circe, a legendary sorceress who turned Odysseus’s shipmates into pigs. The latest tribulation arrived in envelopes that plopped onto doormats in and around the modern town of San Felice Circeo in recent weeks, and demanded that the occupants stump up five years’ back payments of a levy some had no idea they owed. The demands are the latest twist in a dispute with its origins in the Middle Ages.
This article appeared in the Europe section of the print edition under the headline “Of property rights and dead popes”
From the March 27th 2021 edition
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