The Battle of the Brothels

For more than a month the Italian senate had sought refuge in such nice-nellyisms as "case di tolleranza" (houses of tolerance), "case da te" (tea houses) or "persiane chiuse" (closed shutters). Last week, white-maned, octogenarian Gaetano Pieraccini lost his patience. "I am a plain doctor and a Florentine," he cried. "I call bread bread, wine wine and a brothel a brothel." No matter what they called it, Italian senators could no longer evade the issue: whether or not to close Italy's bordellos.

Demi-Rome. It was not an easy matter to decide. The world's oldest profession could claim a long and proud history in Italy. Romulus and Remus, the brothers who founded Rome, it was said, were themselves the bastards of a vestal virgin who yielded to Mars for a consideration. In 1490 a city vicar reported to the Vatican that Rome's prostitutes numbered more than "6,800, not even counting those who live in concubinage and those who, not publicly but in secret, maintain five or six women in their houses." Sixtus V (1585-90) wanted to abolish prostitution, but he was dissuaded by Rome's aldermen, who argued that expulsion of all the city's prostitutes and pimps would cut the population clean in half.

Since 1888, regulated, police-supervised prostitution has been a source of state revenue in modern Italy. Today the Ministry of the Interior collects an annual n to 13 billion lire a year in fees from 722 brothels employing nearly 4,000 girls.

To at least one Roman senator, grey, motherly, left-wing Socialist Angelina Merlin, this situation was a "social disgrace." A year ago last August, she introduced a bill to outlaw houses of prostitution in Italy.

Like Enemy Airplanes. Bordello-keepers united against the anti-brothel bill and raised a 60 million lire ($96,000) fighting fund. In one house in Milan, any customer signing a petition against the bill was awarded one free visit. The girls and the worried madam in a swank Naples house appealed to venerable Senator Benedetto Croce, Italy's foremost philosopher, to block the bill "so that they too might have a prosperous holy year." Letters against the bill poured in on Senator Merlin, who had herself toured Rome's brothels to collect ammunition for her side.

"They came to me," she told the senate later, "in waves like enemy airplanes in wartime. Once they were all from retired colonels. Before that, it was the engineers' week. There have been weeks for lawyers, doctors, sociologists and even a week of letters from youths who say they have reached the age of reason. From all this I can assume that the various categories of customers have been organized."

But soon, political factions lined up alongside Crusader Merlin. The Moscowliners, claiming that the bill was all their own idea, ordered all left-wingers to vote against "a typical plague of bourgeois society." The Communists found allies in their old adversaries the Christian Democrats. "We can't afford," said one Christian Democratic politician, "to give the Communists an opportunity to attack us on moral grounds." Of all the senators, only dissident Socialist Pieraccini spoke out against abolition with any real vehemence. "[The bill] would turn all Italy into the sex jungle of Europe," he roared. "We are all senators here," Pieraccini persisted, in earthy phrases. "How many of us can say we have never been in a whorehouse? Only about 10%."

It was a noisy try, but it failed. Interior Minister Mario Scelba himself rose to present the government's hearty endorsement of the Merlin bill. For the first time in anybody's memory the Communists joined in enthusiastic applause for a Scelba speech. The united front against vice would not be split. When the vote was taken, abolition of prostitution passed by a thumping 187 to 67. Passage by Italy's lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, is expected within a few months.

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