“A man’s home is where his wife lives,” the chief justice declared in an English case in 1863. But a Sicilian magistrate recently heard a plea from a man who was trying to be sent to jail to avoid living with his wife.

Holy Gambino, a 30-year old builder, had been convicted and sentenced to prison for dumping hazardous waste after being caught by police unloading dangerous materials from a lorry on to public ground. After serving some of his sentence, he was then released back into the community to live at home under house arrest in Villabate, near Palermo.

After suffering what he described as relentless nagging by his wife about his defects as a husband and father, Gambino went back to the police station in Ficarazzi to hand himself in and request a return to prison.

It is the first time in Sicily that someone challenging his sentence has argued for a return to prison rather than release from it.

After hearing his plea, however, the magistrate simply cited him for the summary offence of breaking a condition of his house arrest (in travelling to the police station) and sent him directly back home with an order to try to get along with his wife.

Previously, the Italian courts have heard other unusual marital cases related to nagging. In 2003, a court in Rome heard the case of a 23-year-old woman who had been chronically nagged by her mother-in-law about improving her make-up and her figure. The court ruled that “excessive and unreasonable interference” by the mother-in-law was sufficient grounds for a divorce.

In England, nagging was once recognised as a proper basis for divorce in a case in 1947 where a wife had evidently driven her husband into a significant state of mental ill-health by persistently badgering him for many years often until 3 or 4am. “One knows” the judge said “that dropping water wears the stone”.

But where wives have been accused by husbands of ‘nagging’, the female exhortations are often completely reasonable and wouldn’t be condemned if the relationship were between co-workers or flatmates. In 1975, a court heard how Maureen O’Neill had prevailed on her husband for some time to improve his DIY work. But she wasn’t concerned about a shelf that fell down. For years the husband had all the floorboards up everywhere, regularly mixed concrete in the living room, took 30 tons of rubble from under the house and put it in the garden, rarely washed and refused to put a door on the toilet for eight months. The court wasn’t sympathetic to the husband’s ‘stop nagging me’ attitude and granted the wife a divorce.

Professor Gary Slapper is Director of the Centre for Law at the Open University. English Law, by Slapper & Kelly, is published by Routledge-Cavendish

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