Tuscan locals have hit out at tourists who have allegedly silenced a historic clocktower because its tolling is preventing them from sleeping. 

Visitors to the town of Pienza have complained so much that the bells, which traditionally have been tolled every 30 minutes, will no longer ring between 10pm and 7am. 

Complaints mainly came from ‘sleep-deprived’ American tourists staying nearby to the clocktower who are suffering from jetlag.

‘We received complaints from several owners of B&Bs,’ Manolo Garosi, the mayor of Pienza, told the Telegraph .

‘They were mostly from the properties that are close to the main piazza and so near to the belltower.’ 

The noise problem has been exacerbated further by the unbearable heatwave that swept across Italy last month. 

Many of the hotels and B&Bs in Pienza do not have air conditioning and so windows are left wide open to encourage air flow – making the bell’s ringing even louder for sleeping tourists. 

But locals are frustrated that tourists are complaining about a century-old tradition, which they say is in the town’s DNA.

‘We are not the only ones to do this. Other towns that have bell towers have done just the same thing,’ Mr Garosi said.

Some of the 2,000 locals are even saying that they have become so accustomed to the bell tolling every 30 minutes that they are struggling to sleep without it. 

Pienza, which is described as ‘the perfect Renaissance town’, is a picturesque tourist spot which holds UNESCO World Heritage site status. 

Used as the backdrop for Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, the town offers tourists knockout views of textbook Tuscan countryside from the Palazzo Piccolomini.

Feuds between tourists and locals is a time old problem for famous Italian holiday destinations. 

In June, a tourist came under fire for carving his and his girlfriend’s name into the 2,000-year-old Colosseum in Rome. 

The man can be seen scratching ‘Ivan + Hayley 23’ into one of the bricks before grinning at the camera. 

If caught he could face a massive fine which in the past has been up to £17,000. He could even face up to a year of jail time. 

Meanwhile in Easter this year the tiny fishing village of Portofino launched new anti-tourist measures with €275 fines for loitering in selfie hotspots in an attempt to put an end to ‘anarchic chaos’.

The mayor of Portofino has introduced a no-loitering rule in two ‘red zones’ where visitors often take photographs and tourism groups crowd together, The Times reported.

The no-waiting zones were put into effect amid the Easter break tourism boom that saw around 1.7million holidaymakers visiting Italian city centres, a 12 per cent increase from last year. 

The collapse of First Republic is one of the biggest failures in US banking history and represents a serious blow to confidence not just in American banking but in financial stability across the world.

The fantasy that the banking crisis was over and taken care of by the rescue and disposals of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature and Credit Suisse has been blown apart.

These banks were the first wave of victims of the rapid end of a period of super-easy money after a sharp rise in official interest rates on both sides of the Atlantic. 

Easy money led to foolish lending, and higher borrowing costs turned fixed interest holdings, held on many balance sheets, into loss makers destabilising the whole system.

The current tremors evoke memories of 2007-08 and the great financial crisis which saw regulators battling every weekend to resolve the future of failing banks before share markets opened. 

The worst of the current failures has been confined to the US and Switzerland but there are no guarantees that European banks are immune.

Rescuing First Republic is JP Morgan Chase. The bank’s veteran boss Jamie Dimon is good at this stuff. In the financial crisis he stepped in to save Bear Stearns, and snapped up Washington Mutual, giving JP Morgan a retail banking operation. Dimon showed his interest in First Republic when he orchestrated a $30billion (£24billion) deposit consortium in March. 

First Republic shares have since been in free fall and $100billion (£80billion) of deposits have fled. What is terrifying about the fate of First Republic, SVB and Credit Suisse is the rapidity of the deposit outflows.

Social media and one keystroke technology have created conditions for unseen bank runs far faster than anything in economic history.

JP Morgan effectively takes on all of First Republic’s remaining deposits (some £83billion) as well as its assets. 

If some of these assets turn out to be rotten then the losses will be shared between Dimon’s bank and the US bank insurer and regulator. 

Potential losses could top £10billion but as the books are opened there is no telling what will crawl out.

SVB catered directly to the financing needs of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and looked after some of their wealth. 

First Republic serviced their borrowing needs, making enormous mortgage loans at low rates to wealthy borrowers in San Francisco and Silicon Valley. This made the region one of the most expensive places in America.

When the Federal Reserve began to beat back inflation in 2021, First Republic found itself sitting on a massive pile of loans lent at low rates as interest rates soared.

The startling change in borrowing costs has been far from smooth. In autumn 2022 the Bank of England was required to launch a £60billion stabilisation effort to prevent problems in the UK’s pensions system causing insolvencies. 

The fear is that similar crises could be developing in the financial system outside of traditional banking.

Financial leaders have been at pains to argue that what is happening at First Republic and elsewhere is not a repeat of the great financial crisis.

Maybe. But with each failure and rescue, prospects of maintaining the fragile confidence in large swathes of the banking system look more remote.