A court in Italy has ruled that child support can be paid in the form of pizza after a divorced baker supplied his ex-wife with €400 ($664) worth every month.
A 50-year-old pizza baker from a small village outside Padua, northern Italy, was acquitted on criminal charges of failing to pay child support after a judge ruled that he had done his best during hard times to provide €400 worth of pizzas, calzone and other goods from the takeaway pizza place where he worked.
The couple, Nicola Toso and Nicoletta Zuin, divorced in 2002. By 2008, as Italy was hit by a deep economic crisis, the pizza baker, who had since remarried and had three more children, began struggling to make ends meet. From 2008 to 2010 he offered his ex-wife free food instead of the 400 euros a month stipulated in their divorce agreement. At the time, his daughter was 12.
"In lieu of money, the defendant offered his ex-wife the same amount of compensation in the form of takeaway pizzas from his workplace, an offer promptly rejected as 'beggar's change'," wrote Judge Chiara Bitozzi in her ruling.
With a pizza in the village of 10,000 inhabitants costing an average cost of €5 a pie, the ex-wife could have had the right to take-away 80 pizzas a month - more than two a day. But fed up with the paltry pizza payoff, his ex-wife filed a criminal complaint.
