"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

Giò Ponti: Revived in Rome

Ponti in his famous armchair - at home, living "ala Ponti"

Italian design can be art at its best, and found in unlikely places.  RST’s recent foray to the western suburbia of Rome’s via Aurelia brought us to a fascinating and stylish, if small, show of Italian architect Giò Ponti’s interior design.  The setting is the interior design retail shop of Frattali, which is selling modern versions of Ponti’s furnishings.  Frattali’s store – an unlikely modern building in an otherwise undistinguished, even unattractive stretch of via Aurelia (one of the ancient consular roads, one must remind oneself).  

Frattali store on via Aureli

Frattali also currently has on display placards in Italian and English explaining some of the highlights of Ponti’s architectural career – which spanned from the 1920s to the 1970s (he died in 1979).  We recommend a visit before the “show” is scheduled to close on June 9 (info on how to get there at the end of this post). 



armchair - you can buy it too (Montecatini desk
chairs in background)

Titled  “vivere alla Ponti” – or “living alla Ponti”-- the exhibit also is subtitled “Houses inhabited by Giò Ponti.  Experiments in domestic life and architectures for working and living.”  Ponti started including interiors in his buildings early on.  But it was only 2 years ago that remakes of his furniture designs went on the market, with the imprimatur of his heirs:  a stylish, large armchair/poltronia [1953 (that doesn’t look all that useful) from his family home, a metal chair [1935] from one of his most famous buildings, the Montecatini headquarters in Milan, bookcases, dressers, rugs, and coffee tables (see photos here). 

coffee table, rug, cabinet - all ala Ponti

The placards suggest that Ponti was pathbreaking in applying his design skills to the whole building – inside and out.  We note Frank Lloyd Wright was firm in that concept before Ponti.  We also see striking similarities between Ponti’s style and the Los Angeles interiors currently on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s Pacific Design exhibit (1930-1965), part of the large, current, all-LA “Pacific Standard Time” 60+ location exhibition) that, interestingly, overlaps almost all of Ponti's era.

The re-make of the desk chair comes from the
 Montecatini office building designed in the late
1930s.

We expressed some surprise in a chat with one of the store workers about Ponti’s lack of recognition in the U.S.  She pointed out that he was one of the first Italian designers to produce for export.  If so, we say, keep it up!  As regular readers of RST know, we are fans of Ponti, having already done a post on his Fascist-era, rationalist (we would say) 1934 Mathematics Building at La Sapienza (the main university) in Rome.

Ponti was Milanese, and the greatest concentration of his buildings is in Milan.  He designed buildings internationally, from Caracas to Denver (the Denver Art Museum).  There is one more building in Rome, the Grand Hotel Parco dei Principi, nestled at the top of Villa Borghese.  That is on our to-do list.  We have read its interiors have been redesigned in what we would call faux Mediterranean, or as the hotel's website trumpets it, "a facelift inspired by the sumptuous and elaborate style of the patrician villas of Rome’s late-17th-century nobility" - all the rage, as we know from Los Angeles tear-downs as well.  As a result, many of Ponti’s original interior furnishings are on sale on the Web.  No accounting for taste. 

 A lavishly designed catalog for Frattali’s current show begins with a short essay “To re-make or not to re-make, that is the question.”  We’ll let RST readers ponder that one.  We know where we come out.

Dianne

Directions:  Frattali is at via Aurelia, 678.  If you drive, they have their own parking garage – just get onto the feeder road a few blocks before.  For public transport, note via Aurelia, 678 is a little over one mile (1.4 km) from Piazza Cornelia.  If you get yourself to the piazza (it’s a Metro A stop, or various buses go there), you can walk, or take the 246 bus, that runs about every 15 - 30 minutes (not on Sundays) 4 stops.