1 Be sure the property you’re interested in is actually for sale and owned by the person selling it. Your lawyer will have to verify this. One day we found a photo of our property for sale in the local paper long after we had bought it. An agent unknown to us had placed the ad and was not at all contrite about it, dismissing our threat of legal action with a titter.

Don’t be rushed into signing the compromesso, a contract that commits you to paying up to 30% of the purchase price in order to secure the property. Insist on having somebody verbally translate this document into English (it’s the law) and, if you are waiting for a mortgage, insert a clause to the effect that if it is refused you can pull out without penalty.

If a property is held in the name of a company, commission an official valuation (perizia giurata), recognised in law as an estimate of its true worth. If the company declares bankruptcy within two years of the deal you risk being charged with conspiracy in asset-stripping and could lose the property without compensation or recourse. The official valuation proves your innocence by showing the correct market price was paid.

2 You might expect the people who pretty much invented banking to have the world’s best financial system. In reality, you can grow old waiting for an incoming cheque to clear. Drafts can be transmitted at lightning speed but two or three weeks may pass before money reaches your account (minus heavy commission). The speed of your transaction also depends on whether the cheque is written by a bank su piazza or fuori piazza — in or out of the same town.

Italy’s bewildering number of banks is claimed to cause the system’s slowness. It is small wonder financial dealings are conducted in a climate of mistrust when you have fluctuating interest rates that can be checked only retrospectively and a code of ethics based on omerta, the Sicilian principle of silence. Our bank manager confessed to being prohibited from putting anything in writing, which is why he expects clients to speak to him directly. Transparency is the buzzword but we did not see much of it.

3 Have you thought to check if your building, in whole or part, is absolutely legal? Building without benefit of a permit is a national sport, aided and abetted by a parallel system that condones the practice: a bizarre Italian solution of offering periodic amnesties to wrongdoers.

Abusivismo is the name of the game. Frustrated by the sclerosis surrounding any planning application and the dysfunctional bureaucracy that bogs all initiative, many Italians take the law into their own hands. Illegal buildings spring up without benefit of permits, their owners knowing that with luck and by the law of averages an amnesty is likely to be declared and, for a premium, they will get their way.

It is the building that is abusivo, not the owners. If they play their cards right they will pay only a fraction of the fine they would otherwise have faced if prosecuted — and will have avoided the long wait normally associated with obtaining permission. On the other hand, you should know the authorities are fully within their rights to tear down your “abusive” property if they discover it before an amnesty.

4 Little seems to have changed since Dante’s day in the inferno of Italian officialdom. Accounting methods, hours of business, forms of payment, the reams of documentation and the obligatory stamps — both fiscal and rubber — needed to get anything done are mind-boggling.

Happily, the one thing you can count on is the tenacity of the Italian worker to rise above it (when not taking industrial action). Tradesmen and workmen are punctual, reliable and conscientious. Our team of builders worked the typical eight-hour day, from 8am to midday then 1pm to 5pm, not once being late or knocking off early.

5 In Italy, laws can enter the statute book without necessarily replacing existing legislation; you may find layers of law, often contradictory, applying to the same subject.

With building laws, the local mayor is vested with wide powers of intepretation and what applies in one community need not follow in the neighbouring one. What’s more, the law is often applied rigidly; choose the wrong path and the mayor may come down on you like a ton of terracotta.

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