Closing Time

A doughty little woman with tinted grey-blue hair has finally destroyed a venerable Italian institution: the state-supervised brothel. Angelina Merlin, 68, is Italy's only woman Senator. For ten years she has been nagging Italy's legislators to do the right thing. Last week the Chamber of Deputies ran out of delaying tactics, and by a vote of 385 to 115 ordered that all houses of prostitution (which have been paying a 3% tax on income to the state) be closed within six months, and that their 4,000 girls serving 30,000 clients daily be "re-educated."

Monarchist Deputy Angelo Rubino warned that closing the brothels means "free prostitution, which means nothing less than free contagion." Cried one legislator: "We Italians are an exuberant people with deep sexual needs." (Snorted Senator Merlin scornfully: "Men are men.") But many Italians, aware that their nation is the last one in Europe where prostitution is legal, are glad to see it finished. Said one: "What has been going on here is that houses have been selling the bodies of women, and the government has been taking a percentage of the sale." One young Roman was more cynical. "Now that the houses are going to close, we are going to initiate a great public work in Rome--widening the sidewalks."

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