Bikinis, Papal Edicts In Italian Museum

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29024, 13 October 1959, Page 23

Bikinis, Papal Edicts In Italian Museum

(From a Reuter Correspondent)

RIMINI (Italy). One of the world's smallest bikinis will be displayed alongside papal edicts of a century ago in a museum with a difference here. The museum, to be opened soon, will trace the history of bathing in this popular resort on the Italian Adriatic coast. The story starts in the mid-nineteenth century when organised bathing on the beaches first began—under severe police supervision. Among other exhibits, the museum will show bathing costumes through the decades, from the puritanical outfits of last century to the daring creations of today. Rimini city officials say the garments will include a bikini “hardly bigger than a postage stamp.” There will be ancient pedalboats, life-saving equipment, bathing caps of all shapes and materials, beach games, horsedrawn coaches that used to take tourists for rides across the sands, and a unique collection of official ordinances on beachwear and seaside morality. The exhibits will include a display of bathing huts, from ancient, wheeled, horse-drawn devices which followed the movements of the tide to new luxury huts complete with built-in hair-dryers. The documents show how the attitude of authority to beach morals has developed over the decades. Imprisonment One ordinance threatens imprisonment “for a more or less lengthy period” to persons offending beach morals at Rimini. The law was issued in 1845 when central Italy was ruled by the Pope. The order, signed by the Pontifical Governor of Rimini Province, Count Gaetano Magalotti, is believed to be one of the first official pronouncements ever on bathing. It typified the attitude of European governments at the time towards the new habit of collective bathing.

The 1845 ordinance declares: “Since there exists in Rimini a building for the use of bathing set up in the centre of the beach with permanent and compact divisions for the two sexes, it is hereby ordered that men and women should not only bathe without any communication between them, but also under cover at a distance of 30 or more metres from each other.” Men should bathe on the left of the building and women on its right, the order adds. “To prevent any possible malfunctioning in the segregation of the sexes, let each know that he must select that approach which brings him most speedily to the place of lawful bathing if he wishes not to incur the unpleasantness of being turned away by the forces of public order. “The laws of civilisation, of healthy education, of decency and morality are guarantees of the

full execution of the present (ordinance). “If unhappily some loafer should wish to show indecency and impurity then he should know that henceforth such people will be execrated by the People. “The Government authorities declare that from today, just as they do not lack the means, so they will never lack the determination to suppress and punish such impudence in an exemplary manner,” the ordinance warns. It adds that “the most Eminent Cardinal-Legate” of the province was empowered to decide on the punishment of offenders. Near Stadium The museum is being set up in a reconstructed eighteenth-cen-tury house near the Rimini stadium. City officials say the idea of the Rimini museum was inspired by Greenwich Village, in the United States, which was set up by the industrialist, Henry Ford, to record American life at the end of the last century, with stage coaches, steam engines, and other material facets of the United States’ rapid expansion at that time. Police controls on Italian beaches today are relaxed, but the Roman Catholic Church still wages unrelenting war against what it describes as worsening immodesty on Italy’s beaches. Before Pope John XXIH’s election as supreme pontiff, when he was patriarch of Venice, he advised priests to “keep away” from Venice in the summer because many tourists were immodestly dressed. In Pisa, another resort, Archbishop Ugo Camozzo has said that “no-one would suggest reviving obsolete fashions, but there are limits beyond which one must not go, even with respect for the needs of elegance and good taste. “It is not the human body created by God which is evil, but the danger lies in human nature, which tends towards sensuality,” he said.