The Busy Italian Demimonde
GRUBER, RUTH ELLEN
LETTER FROM TODI The Busy Italian Demimonde By Ruth Ellen Gruber Todi Just as the Monica S. Lewinsky story has focused public interest on sex at the top in the United States— or at least...
...The vast majority of the prostitutes in Italy are foreigners—mainly young women from Eastern Europe and Africa...
...When I was a student in Italy in the early '70s, things were different...
...Politicians on both the Left and Right, and even an organization of housewives, have called for the re-establishment of regulated brothels or a licensing system...
...it is, rather, the sexual habits of 9 million or probably more Italians at large...
...Overall, there are believed to be 30,000 to 50,000 active prostitutes in the country...
...Instead, when they arrived they found themselves in the clutches of highly organized international prostitution rings...
...Each of us lived with an Italian family, and all of us Americans would gather after dinner at a local caf...
...Here, though, the concern is not the alleged misconduct of a prominent political figure...
...You Americans, I kept hearing, are such Puritans...
...is a writer based in Italy...
...The Italian media estimated she serviced as many as 5,000 people...
...they find the sight too depressing...
...She never did...
...Sex, sexiness and blatantly sexy innuendo per se are never far from the surface in Italy—and often are crudely right out there in the public face...
...A friend of mine told me an Italian travel magazine had even advised Italian women going to London on vacation to tone down their makeup...
...Two got into the back seat...
...Relatively remote areas have not escaped them either...
...Most, though, are young Africans who work in shifts and stand in gravel parking spots or simply in the roadside bushes...
...A short-haired, sad-eyed woman in her 40s, she looked more like a housewife than a whore...
...At the newsstand in the smallest country café it is impossible to buy a paper without being confronted by a row of hard-core porno magazines with raunchy cover photos...
...What touched off the current flutter was the revelation in mid-February that Barbieri, a prostitute plying her trade in the area of Ravenna—the northeastern city where the author of The Divine Comedy is buried—had unprotected sex with her clients even though she is HIV positive...
...We're concerned that they don't solicit in the street and that they don't put our lives in danger [because of sexually transmitted diseases]," she told the national daily Corriere della Sera...
...LETTER FROM TODI The Busy Italian Demimonde By Ruth Ellen Gruber Todi Just as the Monica S. Lewinsky story has focused public interest on sex at the top in the United States— or at least so it appears from this distance—the Giuseppina Barbieri story has put sex on the front pages in Italy...
...The president of the housewives' association seemed to take it as given that husbands would go to prostitutes whatever the case...
...It was they who wanted to do it," she was quoted by the media as saying...
...It's the law, I have to display them," one newsagent near Todi told me...
...At night they group eerily around open fires lit on main roads leading out of Rome...
...South Africa, they said...
...It is just one of a flood of statistics trumpeted in the media that have laid bare how widespread and deeply entrenched sex for money is in Italian behavior and fantasy...
...They seemed really touched that I had stopped to give them a lift...
...One night when I was working the overnight shift alone, this man paid me a visit—and made a heavy pass...
...I remember one article on cloistered nuns that was illustrated with a picture of a "nun" lifting her habit to expose her breasts...
...Most of the terrified callers were men, but there were a surprising number of calls from women, too...
...Newspapers and TV news broadcasts, which quickly dubbed Barbieri "Lady Aids," ran a picture of her...
...I picked up three of the African women one day and drove them to the local train station...
...Within days, the two hotline numbers were swamped by more than 1,000 calls from around the country...
...A few of the women, who appear to be Italians, are comfortably set up in, yes, Recreational Vehicles...
...The exchange of couples is becoming the great transgression of the Italians," proclaimed the weekly magazine Sette...
...Prostitutes are very visible on certain city streets...
...But men are imported as well...
...In the course of doing research for that piece, I asked editors and advertising agencies about the tactic...
...Many of them were duped into leaving their homes for what they were given to understand would be legitimate jobs...
...Doctors urged clients who recognized the photo to get tested for HIV, and police in Ravenna set up what amounted to hotlines for terrified Johns...
...They would offer to pay me twice as much if I didn't make them use a condom...
...Not long afterward, at the time of the 1974 referendum on divorce, I got a job in a big news office in Rome...
...In fact, the scandal has brought to light a demimonde of clubs throughout Italy where couples switch partners and hire prostitutes together for group sex...
...Ten years ago, I wrote an article about the use of female nudity on magazine covers and for advertising in Italy...
...The present spate of articles on what one newspaper calls "Planet Prostitution" has given the country's major dailies and mainstream magazines an excuse to publish new lurid photos...
...It seems reasonable to us that certain places, or a district, should be devoted to this type of activity...
...The quickest route from my house in Umbria to this lovely medieval hilltown called Todi, the nearest major center, is a road that winds along Lake Corbara and the Tiber River through stunning wooded scenery...
...You are so kind, you are so kind," they kept telling me...
...Ravenna's police chief speculated publicly that thousands more may have been directly involved with Barbieri...
...According to Sette, some 150,000 "aficionados" belong to such clubs...
...Friends of mine will not take the Corbara-Tiber road when they have visiting guests from abroad in the car...
...This being Italy, the publicity triggered by the Barbieri disclosures soon prompted political reactions...
...Some 10,000 of the prostitutes are believed to be "trans"— transvestite men who have gone at least part of the way toward becoming transsexual...
...I spent two weeks then on a so-called homestay program in the Tuscan town of Arezzo, along with other American students from my university...
...One is reminded of the Rue Saint Denis in Paris, or the Red Light district in Amsterdam, except here there are no shadowed doorways or brothel windows...
...Around it a flourishing industry is being born, with many private clubs and associations ready to satisfy the needs of all types of couples—hetero, gay, lesbian, transsexual...
...Nonetheless, it is not at all unusual to see more than a dozen prostitutes lining that less than 10-mile stretch...
...Ruth Ellen Gruber, a past contributor to the NL...
...I always asked the daughter of the family I was staying with if she wanted to come...
...How's business...
...The reason was simple, I was told: It sells...
...With a clientele of 9 million, the business is projected to have a turnover of $ 18 billion...
...What, I found myself wondering, do I say to them...
...Divorce, he declared, should never be permitted...
...In the end, I asked them where they were from...
...More mainstream Italian magazines have a long history of finding any excuse whatsoever to feature bare breasts and more...
...Apparently Barbieri was in great demand because, despite knowing she has the virus that can cause AIDS, she was willing to have sex without making her clients wear condoms...
...The area, consisting completely of small villages and isolated farmhouses, is intensely rural...
...That's the number of Italian men who, according to much publicized reports, patronize prostitutes...
...In effect, this would make prostitution a recognized profession and subject its practitioners to regular health examinations...
...The girl alongside me in the front seat changed out of her micromini skirt into more modest attire as we drove...
...Only at the end of the two weeks did I discover that local rumor had branded us prostitutes, because only prostitutes went to the café after dinner...
...About 50 clubs and 100 sex shops have even formed a sort of guild, called "Federsex...
...A while back, the big circulation-boosting gimmick of a popular gossip magazine was full frontal nude shots of both male and female celebrities...
...There was only one man in the office who did not vote to make divorce legal...
Vol. 81 • February 1998 • No. 3
