"Love Nests"/Exploitation in the Woods: Rome Prostitution

Get a few miles outside Rome's center, on any of a hundred country roads, and you'll see young ladies in very short shorts, trolling for business.  Sometimes there's a couch where the work gets done.  In this case, the love - or sex -  bed, which admittedly seems a bit too close to the traffic for privacy, has been covered with wide strips of blue fabric.

These photos were taken on via di Castel di Guido, between the town of Castel di Guido and via Aurelia, west of Rome.  A few hundred yards down the road, we found the women who might have made use of this spot, soliciting motorists as they came off the eastbound exit ramp. 

We probably see more evidence of prostitutes than most Romans, since we are often hiking near these only-barely-remote spots.  We've chatted with some of these women, but not about their jobs.  They've offered to - and have - protected our scooter while we go exploring.

The issue of prostitution in Italy is a difficult one.

The European Union categorizes prostitution as completely legal in Italy and other European states, including Spain, Portugal and the UK. But it’s street prostitution that’s legal in Italy. Brothels are not. The 1958 Merlin law (named for Lina Merlin, the first woman elected to Italy’s Senate) banned brothels (known as case di tolleranza, "houses of tolerance") and imposed a new offense, “exploitation of prostitution,” aimed at pimps and clients.

In Italy, police use laws based on obscenity, including dressing in revealing and suggestive clothing, to move prostitutes out of an area or neighborhood. Current Italian law punishes obscene acts committed in the vicinity of places frequented by children and young people. According to a Rome prosecutor, these are parks, schools, day-care centers and athletic facilities. The result is women who ply their trade on the roadsides we frequent - far from the city center.

In Italy immigrant sex workers are a particularly vulnerable group. The International Organization for Migration estimated that 80 percent of the 11,000 Nigerian women who entered Sicily in 2016 would end up trafficked into the sex trade. These women — as well as undocumented women in the U.S. sex trade — face deportation if they attempt to report their circumstances.

There's more discussion of the pros and cons of legalization of prostitution in Dianne's article in TheAmerican/inItalia.

Bill and Dianne

John Hersey's A Bell for Adano: the Story of the 'Good Occupation'

Once the darling of the literary world, John Hersey's A Bell for Adano has fallen from grace, its reputation diminished to the point where no critic of standing would include the book in a list of the great novels of the 20th century.  Yet the book had its moment, and it was a long one.  Published in February 1944 to considerable acclaim, A Bell for Adano opened on Broadway (with Frederic March) in December of 1944 and in 1945 came to the silver screen (with John Hodiak) and won the Pulitzer Prize in Literature.  It was distributed free in millions of copies in the immediate postwar era, the play was produced for the Hallmark Hall of Fame Theater in 1967 and, whatever its literary merits, the novel was given in large numbers to American soldiers preparing for the conflict in Afghanistan. 

American troops on the beaches of Licata, 1943

The basic story is simple.  In the words of Wikipedia (why reinvent the wheel?) "it tells the story of an Italian-American officer [the novel's Victor Joppolo] in Sicily during World War II who wins the respect and admiration of the people of the town of Adano by helping them find a replacement for the town bell that the Fascists had melted down for rifle barrels."  How touching. There is some factual

Licata's Bell Tower

basis for the novel, though there is no Adano in Sicily.  Hersey was embedded with the US Army for 4-5 days after it came ashore at Licata, Sicily in 1943.  There, he observed the American Military Governor, Frank S. Toscani, deal with problems of the occupation.  Licata was, indeed, missing its town bell, hauled away and melted down by the Mussolini regime.

RST's interest in the book was piqued by an essay by Rutgers Professor Susan L. Carruthers in the most recent issue of The Journal of American History (March 2014).  You don't have to run out and buy it, because I'll tell you what it says--or some of it.  We can start with the title:  '"Produce More Joppolos': John Hersey's A Bell for Adano and the Making of the 'Good Occupation.'"  Carruthers' take is more complex than the novel, and more interesting, too.  She argues that all occupations--even those carried out by Americans, and even the occupation of Italy during and after World War II--are nasty affairs, a form of imperialism, really, in which the occupiers (the conquerors) are inevitably disliked by the native population (the conquered), no matter how warm and fuzzy the commanding officer and some of the troops might be.  Among the points of tension is that occupying soldiers (enough of them, anyway) invariably think that sex with the local girls is their right, to be procured by any means necessary, including "coercion and C rations."  Although some of Licata's citizens may have mourned for their bell, what they really needed was food, and getting it put them into undesirable situations (offering sex for food) or in contact with the black market, where a good portion of the available supply was whisked away by unscrupulous, greedy soldier-occupiers, to be sold at high prices.

These things don't happen in A Bell for Adano.  Flirtations, yes.  But no rape, no prostitution, no adultery, no sex for food, no sex period.  And no black market.

From the film: An American soldier, with a simple and
barefoot Italian fisherman

As told in the novel, it was, in Carruthers' term, the "good occupation."  The Americans were decent and caring, and Adano's Italians were, well, too simple to be bad: "fat, lazy, sentimental, garrulous, winsome," with

"protruding bellies, flappings hands, and gabbing mouths, given to theatrical displays of feeling and obsequious performances of deference."  Adano's Italians (Hersey's Italians) were, Carruthers argues, just glad to be liberated, eager to be instructed in the rudiments of democracy, pleased to have a strong (and benign) leader in Joppolo.  A simple people, not quite ready for self-rule.  (The myth of the good occupation has parallels: with regard to the deportation of the Jews, the myth of the good Italian and,
relevant to Italy's North African empire,
the myth of the good Italian colonizer). 

For Carruthers, A Bell for Adano's most important achievement--and arguably its most important purpose--was to present a way of thinking about occupation "without thinking of it as occupation.  Going unnamed, occupation lost its oppressive weight....Americans [who don't like to think of their country as imperialist, despite all that trouble with the Indians] could rest assured that they represented a force for good in the world, leaving only 'constitutions and parliaments,' not 'occupying armies,' as Bush put it in 2002."  Hersey's novel, she concludes, "helped freeze occupation at the euphoric moment of liberation.  What came next remained safely beyond the frame."

With appreciation and thanks to Susan L. Carruthers.

Bill

Garage Art: the Pinup in Rome

Grease monkeys like their pinups.  Back where the work is done, where the oil is changed and the tires rotated, there's usually a poster or calendar featuring a fetching young thing in short shorts straddling a motorcycle or leaning over a front fender, ready to replace a spark plug or remove the air filter. 

Center: A helpful auto repairman approaches woman in distress. 

That's true in the US, anyway--at least that's how I remember it--and when I walked by the garage (photo above), on Via Nocera Umbra in a sedate, middle-class area of the quartiere of Tuscolano, I was sure I had stumbled upon the tip of the pinup iceberg.  Surely Rome's mechanics had their calendar girls, too.  I imagined coming upon one suggestive display after another, the sum proving my theory that men are men, mechanics mechanics, and garage art garage art, the world over. 

To make a long story short, I never found another,  Despite zealous, even intrusive observation of every garage I passed on my walks through Rome's neighborhoods, I never found another pinup.  Not a one. 

Where had I gone wrong?  Italy is not a prissy culture, or a censorius one.  For many years the television show "Colpo Grosso" was well known for women "flashing" their breasts.  And today, stores selling sun-tan lotions advertise their wares in the window using luscious top-less cardboard models.  No, it's not that Italians are squeamish about sex or sexiness.

A better explanation has to do with the shape of Rome's car and scooter repair industry.  Many of the shops are small, shallow, room-size affairs, big enough for one or two lifts and tools, and they're open to the sidewalk, so that passers-by are close to the action inside.  The calendar pinups would be there, revealed in all their immodesty to every school girl and grandmother.  Perhaps not the best idea. 
Bill