Italy: a country where a man may beat his wife but cannot flog fishy pasta; ROME DAYS

It's all right to beat your wife to a pulp, just as long as you don't do it too often. Should your battered wife then divorce you, you're still OK because you can skip your alimony payments without risk of criminal prosecution. You can say as many rude things as you like in public about the Virgin Mary, just as long as you leave the Lord God's name out of it. Oh, and should your line of business ever tempt you to off-load cans of food that are way past their sell-by date, go right on ahead. In Italy, it's all perfectly legal.

These are just some of the extraordinary pronouncements made in the past few months by the highest judicial authorities in the land. The Italian legal system has always been prone to Byzantine modes of literal-mindedness and surreal decision-making based on the interpretation of the tiniest clauses in the penal code, but recently it has been excelling itself.

A husband who thrashed his wife in a jealous frenzy because he suspected her of messing around with other men was told by the Court of Cassation, the highest appeals court in the land, that he had acted fully within his rights. Another husband, whose beatings were so severe that his wife spent 10 days in hospital, was absolved of all criminal charges by the same court on the grounds that the beatings could not be proven to have been a regular occurrence.

Earlier this week, the court upbraided its judicial colleagues in Naples for presuming to prosecute a man caught selling food that had gone past its sell-by date. "The expiry date of the product has nothing to do with the way in which it has been packaged and preserved," the judgment opined. "It was without doubt a mistake for the [lower court] to presume that the product was in a poor state of preservation, without carrying out any investigation to that effect, purely for the reason that the expiry date on the packaging had lapsed several years ago."

Some of the court's judgments have been of a far less serious nature, but nutty just the same. A bag of pasta may be labelled as a bag of pasta when it is made with eggs or spinach, the court ruled last month, but not when it is flavoured with tomato or cuttlefish ink.

Why not? Because the law "does not foresee" such confections being consistent with the definition for pasta, so another name for them must be found.

What the law does and does not foresee is at the heart of many of the court's crazier rulings. Italy is a country drowning in laws, by-laws, decrees and legalistic definitions that seek to delineate very precisely the borderline between private affairs (i.e. the relationship between a husband and his wife) and public ones (everything from the state-approved recipe for pasta to the penal definition of assault and battery).

The trouble is, even the profusion of laws - roughly four times the number in France, which has a similar legal system - does not provide an answer to everything. And when Italian courts cannot find an answer to a problem in the penal or civil code, they hand the problem up the ladder to the Court of Cassation which then has to improvise reasoning based on the tangle of legislation at hand.

What on earth is it supposed to do with a man hauled before the law for screaming religious obscenities? Blasphemy is technically a crime, but policing it rigorously would land almost the entire country in the dock.

So the court came up with a wonderfully Solomonic compromise: insulting God constitutes blasphemy, but insulting saints, religious institutions or even the Virgin Mary is not. Such decisions may not be decent, honest or truthful, but around here they are still the law.