No cowbells, please, we're tourists

From the tail wagging the dog department: a hotelier in the Italian Dolomites, an area of dramatic limestone peaks and pasture, has filed suit against a farmer claiming €56,000 in damages for loss of custom. How so? Because she reckons that the hundreds of cow bells on the farmer's herd are disturbing her clients peace and quiet and putting them off staying at her hotel. Even though herders in the Alps and Dolomites have been putting bells around cows necks for centuries in order to keep track of the beasts on open pastures, she says that her punters have been complaining about the noise disturbing their sleep.

To resolve the dispute, the farmer has proposed a solution based on a sort-of-similar case, where a parish priest in a nearby Alpine valley was ordered to stop sounding his church bell between 10pm and 7am during the tourist season. In the cowbell case, the farmer has declared himself willing to remove all the bells at sunset and re-attach them at dawn, which really is quite funny when you envisage it, and hasn't impressed the hotelier who's spurned the somewhat surreal compromise.

It's difficult to know what to say about a story like this, other than to shake your head sadly at the crass ignorance and stupidity of some people when they go abroad and expect the locals to bow and scrape to their every tourist whim. I've been to the Alps and Dolomites a good few times, and the sound of cows clanking away is as integral to the area as flower-festooned pastures (created and maintained by millennia of animal grazing), dramatic heart-stopping peaks, and cosy mountain rifugi. It can grate at first (do cows get tinnitus, I wonder?) but you very soon get used to it. If homo turisticus gets the hump, the only reasonable thing to say is that this is how people have lived in the area for centuries, and if it gets on your tits then go somewhere else.

Dolomiti, guerra a mucche e campanacci. La Repubblica Online, 3/8/06.