Videocassettes Fuel Popularity : Pornography Becomes Boom Industry in Italy

Michelangelo has been playing for 500 years at the Sistine Chapel, but a few hundred yards away at the Mercury Theater the show changes every afternoon. Recent attractions included “Cover Girl,” “Love Me,” and “The Touchables.”

The pornography industry, with nary a fig leaf, is booming in Italy today. A Roman Catholic nation that used to import most of its pornography, Italy is emerging as a major new producer and exporter of upscale pornographic movies for the growing international videocassette market.

That is only part of the picture. In Italy, one rented videocassette in four is now pornographic. Soft-core pornography is finding its way onto prime-time television. Pornographic magazines are displayed at almost every corner newsstand, sometimes displayed alongside comic books for children. New chains of sex supermarkets, one of them called Magic America, are big businesses that advertise on private television channels in northern and central Italian cities.

No Major Outcry

One of Europe’s most visible pornography queens sits in Parliament. Morals charges are pending against her in several strait-laced towns, but there is no major outcry on a national level for new legislation to regulate pornography. The Italian government, drifting from crisis to crisis, shows no interest. The Roman Catholic Church, while disapproving, seems resigned.

A new study estimates that the industry’s income doubled in two years, to a gross of about $500 million in 1987, about 40% of it outside fiscal control.

“Italian production of pornography, from almost artisanal levels, has become an industry in which the small producer has been overtaken by big organizations with the capacities for distribution on international markets,” said Gian Maria Fara, president of the nonprofit Institute of Political, Economic and Social Studies, which did the survey.

According to Alberto Sobrero, a University of Rome anthropologist who directed the six-month study, the spread of videocassettes is key to the increase in both production and quality.

Boom in Cassettes

“Now, many couples enjoy pornographic cassettes at home,” Sobrero said one recent morning. “And today’s cassette viewers tend to be better educated and of a higher social and economic level than traditional pornography consumers of three or four years ago.”

Videocassette players, increasingly available in Italy for the past couple of years, now total about 1.5 million, and their number is growing rapidly, expanding the market and stimulating greater Italian pornographic movie production.

Not long ago, Italy imported most of its X-rated films from the United States or Scandinavia. Now, it exports to Spain, Greece and other European countries, according to the study. Widely advertised within the country, Italian pornographic cassettes cost about $100, with most being bought through the mail.

“In the past two or three years, Italian pornography has changed dramatically, from low-quality material for restricted audiences to higher-quality productions for the more affluent video watchers,” Sobrero said.

Among the many pornographic magazines now available, Sobrero noted, the new and vigorous ones are upscale, more soft- than hard-core. They cost upward of $10 and attract not only sophisticated readers but also major advertisers of fast cars and designer clothes.

Red Light Districts Hurt

Not benefiting from the boom, according to the researchers, are Italy’s luce rossa (red light) movie houses. Their product is generally second-rate, and so is their clientele. At the Mercury one recent evening, about 60 men sat widely spaced in a theater big enough for five times their number to watch a poorly staged encounter of two free-thinking couples at a beach party.

A Hungarian-born bleached blonde named Ilona Staller leads a campaign to totally legalize pornography from her seat as a Radical Party legislator in the Italian Chamber of Deputies. Live sex shows in which Staller stars as sex goddess “Cicciolina” are raided by police in some cities but draw appreciative crowds in others. As leader of a Rome-based pornographic agency, Staller has taken her shows abroad with the same mixed results. One recent weekend she was deported from Belgium.

“Italian laws are very vague and depend entirely on local interpretation,” Sobrero said. Porn shops, as they are called, flourish in Turin and Milan but are banned in Rome, which tolerates magazines and movie houses forbidden in other cities.

According to Sobrero, “pornography is not a social problem, nor a question of censorship, but the need (is) for laws that better control its production and distribution. There should be no room for minors in pornography, and neither should it be sold at newsstands where children come looking for Mickey Mouse.”