Coffee for Every Taste

To many a visiting businessman, it was the best thing Rome had to offer. As early as 7:30 in the morning he could dial a particular phone number and ask, "Can I come for a coffee?" The reply was usually, "Yes. We make it good and for all tastes." Then he would go to one of seven luxury apartments, where his "coffee" would be waiting with plenty of sugar--in the form of a high-class call girl.

The police uncovered this matinal merrymaking after they traced a 15-year-old runaway girl from Milan to the apartment of Giselda Giovannelli, 55, in the Monte Sacro (Sacred Mountain) suburb of Rome. Staking out the building, they watched scores of pretty young women and well-dressed men pass in and out. The women were so attractive that, in the words of one neighbor, "they would give a blind man back his sight." As the morals cops discovered when they arrested Giselda and found her list of clients and 150 prostitutes, the girls were housewives, young mothers, students, secretaries, airline hostesses, salesgirls and models--nearly all living with their families or relatives.

Illusory Freedom. It was not the first time since 1958, when "houses of tolerance" (but not freelance prostitution) were made illegal, that so many supposedly upright girls were caught in similar positions. In 1962, a group of 30 to 40 college girls from "good families" were discovered selling themselves for "pin money" in Rome. Just last year, the morals squad busted up a vice ring of 200 girls, who had to be beautiful, intelligent, from a high social class and multilingual to accommodate businessmen from Common Market countries. Many of the girls were happily married.

Like the well-heeled French wife played by Catherine Deneuve in Luis Bunuel's movie Belle de Jour, the girls apparently engaged in part-time prostitution for more than the money. Not that the money was bad; Giselda charged $80 to $250 per coffee break, and her girls received cuts ranging from $50 to $100. They never worked past 8:30 p.m., and they were usually home in time for dinner with their unsuspecting families. Some psychologists theorized, however, that this sexual moonlighting was an illusory attempt to satisfy the modern needs for freedom, adventure and unhampered sexuality--particularly in a society that professes to place a high value on premarital purity and wifely fidelity.

"These women don't feel themselves to be prostitutes," says Rome University Sociologist Franco Ferrarotti. "They feel sophisticated, unique and exquisite. But they live in contrasting worlds. Their heads are back in the paese, the old home town. Their feet and one or two other parts are in the modern world. But the only really modern things about these women are their boots, their makeup and false eyelashes."

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