Italy Acts Against 66 Magazines

Press, Volume CVII, Issue 31548, 9 December 1967, Page 23

Italy Acts Against 66 Magazines

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright) ROME, Dec. 7. Italian police have acted in a Vaticaninspired campaign to clean-up Rome’s ‘’girlie” magazines. The first victims were the editor and two staff journalists of the comic strip publication, “Gong.” They face maximum sentences of three years gaol if found guilty on obscenity charges. The arrests followed a biting attack in the Vatican newspaper “Osservatore Romano,” on sexy magazines flooding the nation’s news stands, in spite of frequent police seizures. “Osservatore Romano” expressed disgust at the “decadence, perversion, sadism and drug addiction” peddled in the “girlie” books, many based on successful foreign publications, and lambasted the Government for not taking stiffer measures. The State’s fear of curbing press freedom was a pretence, it claimed. The angry Vatican reaction brought swift measures by 184 Christian Democrat deputies who submitted a Parliamentary question to the Justice Minister. They de-

manded to know what urgent steps the Government planned to control the obsessive spread of vulgar and nauseating pornography. “Osservatore Romana” followed up yesterday with a broadside on obscenity, not only in publications but in entertainment and fashions. The erotic and sex element in modern society produced maniacs, and sex was the cause of many crimes, it said. The unprecedented boom in Italian pin-up magazines began late last year. Many sought to ape the successful American “Playboy” magazine which is banned in Italy. Now there are over a dozen Italian pin-up magazines with names like “Playmen," “Kent,” "Supersex" and “Men”. Under strict Italian laws—like the ban on bare bosoms —they walk a legal tightrope, but manage to put out issues which may be tamer, but just as enticing, as their freer foreign counterparts. One magazine got around the law against bare breasts by publishing pictures of a girl with a painted-on bikini. Another carried the picture of a naked girl lounging beside a Renoir nude, with the implication "if Renoir could do it, so can we.”