This morning, Carabinieri officers from the Sorrento Company seized the "Quattro Passi" tourist accommodation complex, a renowned Michelin-starred restaurant in Nerano, a hamlet of Massa Lubrense. The order was issued by the investigating judge of the Torre Annunziata Court at the request of the Public Prosecutor's Office.
The investigation started in July 2025
The investigation, conducted by the Sorrento Company's NOR Operational Unit and coordinated by the Public Prosecutor's Office, began last July. Investigators gathered serious evidence against the club's managers for illegal land development.
According to the reconstruction of what was reconstructed through a technical consultancy commissioned by the Prosecutor's Office, from 1982 until October 2025 the suspects built a massive real estate complex in an area subject to stringent landscape and environmental constraints, completely lacking any legitimate building permits.
Illegitimate amnesties and administrative complicity
The investigations also highlighted the "negligent, to say the least" conduct of the Municipality of Massa Lubrense. Over the years, the local administration has issued amnesty measures marred by gross irregularities: they were granted decades after the relevant requests were received and in the absence of the legal and factual requirements.
In the meantime, between the amnesty request and his release, the properties had been further unlawfully modified, as revealed by repeated checks by the Municipal Police.
“Territory subservient to economic expansion”
In the seizure order, the investigating judge uses harsh words: "Such conduct essentially allowed the subjugation of a portion of the municipal territory, which was an olive grove, to the needs of the defendants' expansion of the construction and economic/tourist-accommodation activities, in total disregard for the morphology of the territory, environmental constraints, and urban planning regulations."
The judge found the original building permits issued under the amnesty procedure to be unlawful, both because the volumetric limits were exceeded through the "artificial splitting of applications" and because the conditions for amnesty were lost due to subsequent unauthorized conversions.
Undeveloped area transformed into a commercial development
The applications for the third building amnesty were deemed "legally inadmissible," as they involved works in an area subject to landscape restrictions and classified by the PUT as an environmentally protected zone with absolute prohibition on building.
"The entire property complex must be classified as the result of ongoing and ongoing illegal construction, which still lacks urban planning legitimacy," concludes the investigating judge, highlighting the "significant and lasting damage to the urban, landscape, and environmental structure of the area."
Over the course of three decades, the suspects transformed a wooded area, where at most a rural building stood, into a full-fledged commercial complex intended for high-end catering.
Source EDITORIAL TEAM
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