Snapshots from Italy IV - A Neighborly Dispute

The half-mile driveway to our hotel on the island of Ischia was under construction for eighteen months. The hotel owner was in a dispute with his neighbor (who shares the driveway) as to who should pay to fix the road.  Meanwhile, guests could either walk up the hairpin turns high over the Tyrrhenian Sea or wait at a staging area for the hotel to retrieve them on golf carts.

We first noticed in 2012 that stones from the wall along the driveway had tumbled down the hillside.

Walkers could become ghosts, swallowed by gaping voids that delineated the sides of the roadway. "This is a prestigious hotel and I don't understand why the owners can't negotiate a settlement," I said to Charley. "They're a member of a chain that must demand inspections."

"You'd think they'd have paid off the neighbor," Charley, the pragmatist, said.

"There has been a dispute as to who owns the part that needs fixing," the hotel manager told us with eyes on his shoes.  "They won't accept our offer."

In 2013 a new rock wall appeared where the driveway had been disintegrating.  The neighbor had constructed a ninety-degree angle where the property divided.  The walls created such a narrow turn that large taxis scraped their sides trying to get through. Unless we were in Lilliputian cars, we had to wait for shuttles to bring us up to the hotel. It was imperative we chose a small taxi to manage the turn if we decided not to walk.

I could hear the neighbor saying to our hotel owner, "Gotcha!"