A gay couple has been refused entry at a guesthouse in Italy after its owner told them it does not “accept gays and animals”.

The pair who are from Naples said they were left dismayed after learning they were not welcome at Ciufo guest house in Calabria in southern Italy because the Catholic owners believe in “traditional families”.

Massimo Arcangeli had been arranging the final details of their trip with the guesthouse in a hamlet called Santa Maria via Whatsapp when he was told they do not allow gay people to lodge there.

Mr Arcangeli said: “It immediately made me think of the famous message Nazis would post on their shop windows: ‘No dogs or Jews’. Seventy years have passed since then and this story cannot be ignored.”

Arcigay, the first and largest national gay organisation in Italy, has demanded the hotel is removed from Booking.com and a number of other websites for hotel reservation.

Filippo Mondella, the owner of the guest house, has now told Radio Capital he penned the note while driving. He insisted he did not intend to offend anyone when he told the couple: "This is important and I don't want to appear like a troglodyte, but we don't accept gays and dogs."

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Mr Mondella claimed he had made a punctuation error and had not intended to class dogs and gay people in the same grouping.

But he nevertheless sought to defend his position by arguing the B&B was a private zone and their faith was the priority.

LGBT rights have come a long way in Italy in recent years – with a civil unions law passed in 2016 providing same-sex couples with many of the rights of marriage – but deeply-entrenched cultural prejudices in the country persist.

A Rainbow Europe report published in May found the country scored just 27 per cent in its protections for and rights granted to LGBT people. This makes the country one of the worst countries in Western Europe in terms of gay rights. Nevertheless, its ranking of 32nd out of 49 countries was a rise of three places from the 2016 ranking when it gained a score of just 20 per cent.