ITALY: Southern Exposure

Shocked by the “indecent undress” of foreign tourists, Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, 76-year-old Roman Catholic Cardinal Patriarch of Venice, last month advised visiting priests and nuns to stay away from Venice in the summer. “It is,” said the cardinal in a circular letter, “an open outrage against natural and Christian morals to wear in the public streets scanty clothing barely tolerable at beaches.” In Rome the Vatican newspaper Osservatore Romano approvingly reprinted Roncalli’s letter and added its own objections to foreign tourists who “wear in our cities clothing fit only for their own bedrooms or bathrooms.” The weather is no excuse, said Osservatore, for parading the streets —and even St. Peter’s Square—in hip-high shorts and halter bras: “Italy is not on the equator, and even there lions have their coats and crocodiles are sheathed in their precious hides.”

Osservatore called on police to crack down, and within 48 hours Rome police did, but with tact befitting a nation anxious to remain the world’s No. 1 tourist attraction. A “strict and precise” directive to police noted that under Article One of the Concordat between Italy and the Vatican state, “police are obliged to prevent and repress any abuse against morality. Those found in succinct clothing will be gently invited to leave and to dress themselves with greater decorum. In cases of resistance, they will be identified, reported to their respective embassies and prosecuted.”

No foreigners resisted—not even the German woman who was told off by police for wearing toreador pants and bare midriff, nor the American girl in a bikini chased from the Fountain of Trevi. But Communist newspapers raised a hue and cry about “clerical intolerance,” and some of Italy’s leading non-Communist papers joined in. Said Turin’s liberal La Stampa: “The truth is, not many Italians are horrified by the sight of a girl in shorts.” Added the largest newspaper in Italy, Milan’s conservative Corriere della Sera, “They are proposing tourism in long pants and hard collars. They will not prevail.”