REPORTER Andrea Svedberg spent a long month last winter visiting Manhattan's high-fashion houses, selecting the minimal clothes to be shown in this week's color spread on the new nude look. But while finding the right garments turned out to be a time-consuming procedure, there was no difficulty in choosing the setting for the photographs. Because Greece and Crete, Sardinia, Rhodes and Rome are places where the nude look was familiar centuries ago, the editors decided that the only proper background would be the Mediterranean littoral.

Early this spring Andrea flew off to Rome, accompanied by Photographer Ormond Gigli, a trunkful of clothes and four top fashion models:

> Benedetta Barzini, the daughter of Luigi. (The Italians) Barzini, divides her time between modeling and acting in Italy.

> Naomi Sims, who grew up in the heart of Pittsburgh, was making her first trip to Europe. She was determined to turn the voyage into a cram course on classical civilizations.

> Maud Adams migrated to Manhattan via Paris from her home in northern Sweden. She has managed to keep traveling, last year in India for a magazine that decided to shoot the story of Cinderella there.

> Samantha Jones, a Canadian, did some modeling in Paris after dropping out of the University of Toronto. Her greatest adventure was a disappointing visit to the Dalai Lama: "He didn't tell me anything."

To travel around Rome, the girls, along with Gigli and his photographic gear, piled into a large Cadillac that the driver liked to boast once belonged to Pope John. When they moved to the island of Rhodes, they had to hire donkeys to carry themselves and their equipment up the steep approach to the temple of Athena at Lindos.

A crowded schedule and hasty traveling between locations brought unavoidable problems, but nothing was quite so disconcerting as the cold and rainy out-of-season weather that the travelers had to contend with. There were days when the models' clothes seemed doubly flimsy. As veterans of such assignments, Reporter Svedberg and Photographer Gigli had come prepared. Gigli handled his cameras while bundled up in a windbreaker; Andrea's working uniform was blue jeans, a heavy sweater and a ski jacket.

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