A British widow living in Italy has issued a warning to other expats after she had to tear down her newly built pool because she did not receive the right permissions.
Anne Perkins, 75, a former graphic designer from Brighton, said that other British expats in Italy should ensure they familiarised themselves with local regulations or it could well end up costing them thousands of pounds extra.
Mrs Perkins decided to leave England after her husband’s death in 2018, and settled on the countryside in the central Italian region of Abruzzo.
The next year, she bought a three-bedroom farmhouse for €150,000 (£123, 743) near the seaside town of Vasto to spend her retirement years and managed to secure residency before Brexit came into force in 2020.
However, a few years later, she ran into problems. After the Covid-19 pandemic, Mrs Perkins became more reluctant to visit the crowded beaches, so decided to build a pool in her garden so she could ease her joint pain with daily swims in spring and summer.
In 2023, she hired a building firm to excavate her back garden for a 15-metre pool.
After a few months of building work, the pool was almost finished.
But one day, a police officer appeared at her home. It was the beginning of a nightmare, Mrs Perkins says.
“We had already dug into the garden, some four metres deep, and built the pool adding concrete and filling it with water, when a police agent sent by the town hall came knocking at my door for an inspection. He had been informed by some neighbours, annoyed by the daily noise of the works, that something was going on at my place,” she says.
The officer asked her to show him the required pool building permits to excavate her garden.
“I had absolutely no idea I had to get the green light from local authorities to build an open-air pool in my backyard. I thought permits were only for an indoor pool with roof,” she says.
“I was sure all was good, what a fool! If only the building company had informed me about the permits, or had I asked around, I would have avoided all this hassle and waste of money and time.”
As a result, the excavation works were blocked and her garden declared off limits. She also had to completely remove the pool – which had already cost her €20,000 (£16,500).
“I had to bring the garden back to its original state immediately or I would have been fined some €5,000 (£4,125). That meant undoing all the work, empty the pool, take down the concrete, take it to a certified deposit site, call a truck full of soil to fill the pool garden hole, and lay wooden planks over it. Plant grass again over it all,” she says.
All this cost her an extra €5,000, and took about five months. She was told that only once the garden was recovered to its original state, could she apply for the necessary permits for a new pool – which, to rebuild from scratch – would cost her another €20,000.
“I applied for permits last year, and am still waiting for feedback. I had to hire a surveyor to do the paperwork for me, liaising with the regional and town authorities to get the many green lights needed in terms of structural ground safety. Italian bureaucracy is head-splitting,” she says.
In addition, she said she was unaware that her farmhouse was located close to a protected park classified as “potentially hiding archaeological remains”.
“This means that even the undergrounds of adjacent homes could be of archaeological interest and therefore further ground checks are required before excavating all private gardens,” Mrs Perkins adds. Geological experts have already paid a visit to examine the garden and – luckily – found nothing that might cause another problem.
If all goes well with the authorisation process, Mrs Perkins can start rebuilding a new pool, which she expects to take about a year. She needs to finalise the required paperwork and go through the “infinite” bureaucratic loops, she says.
Mrs Perkins stresses that many British expats living in idyllic farmhouses could be caught out by the same rules if they decide to build a pool without being aware of all the rules and local planning regulations.
“I ran afoul of the local authorities’ building regulations and permits – other British expats should beware,” she says.
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