Photo via Flickr user Jessica and Lon Binder
Neighbours can be shitty. That guy upstairs whose favourite hobby is to litter your window ledge with cigarette butts and ash. The lady across the hall who bangs on your door in her dressing gown if you so much as think about turning up your laptop speakers past 10 PM. Then there's the group of students three doors down playing 90s garage on a Tuesday night until the birds start singing.And now, an Italian couple have been fined 2,000 Euros by the highest courts in Rome for un-neighbourly behaviour so offensive, judges had to create a completely new category for their crime.The transgression in question wasn't over forgetting the correct rubbish collection days or using communal hallways as overflow for storing personal belongings. The pair were pulled up for cooking smelly food too often. Or, as the Supreme Court of Cassation described it, an "olfactory molestation."Neighbours of the couple, who live in an apartment block in Monfalcone, a town in the north east of Italy, complained that the overwhelming smell of rich sauces and fried food like fritto misto (mixed fried seafood) wafts into their flats on a regular basis. One resident told The Times, "They impregnated the flat with the smell of pasta sauce and fried food—it felt like their kitchen was in my house."The judge's ruling came after a long-standing battle between the couple and their neighbours, which had been debated in local and county courts before finally ending up in the highest court of appeal in Italy. The judge was told that an expert hired by the neighbours had traced the smells to a vent connected to an extractor fan on the couple's floor.Makes your accidental hangover habit of filling the house with the smell of burnt toast seem like nothing.