Silvio Berlusconi was joking when he offered his wife to the Danish PM in 2008. However, a new poll suggests that a quarter of Italian couples are considering it for real.
Many married couples planning to visit the Tuscan countryside or the Eternal City this summer may want to reconsider accepting a generous dinner party invitation from a hospitable Italian couple. According to a new report, it appears that a quarter of all Italian couples engage in wife swapping on a regular basis.
The revelation doesn’t come from the seedier quarters of the country that gave the world Casanova, but from the usually serious pages of national broadsheet La Stampa.
According to yesterday’s front page article, entitled “The Lunch Time Swingers”, an estimated 500,000 Italian couples are officially swapping partners at private sex clubs, with thousands more doing it in a more ad-hoc fashion in car parks, specially designated beaches or even cemeteries.
The report will have Italy’s Catholic clergy shaking with anger at the congregation from their pulpit but when you consider the country’s lothario leader, Silvio Berlusconi, it is perhaps not entirely surprising. This is the man, after all, who – in front of the international press corps gathered in the opulent quarters of Palazzo Chigi (the Italian version of Downing Street) – once tried to pimp his wife Veronica to the Danish Prime Minister, Anders Fogh Rasmussen.
“Rasmussen is the most handsome Prime Minister in Europe. I think I will introduce him to my wife because he is even more handsome than Cacciari,” Mr Berlusconi quipped, in a reference to his wife’s alleged but subsequently denied fondness for the former mayor of Venice, Massimo Cacciari.
The La Stampa article, primly struggling with whether to call this new Italian predilection a “passion” or a “hobby”, said wife swapping had increased everywhere “at a rate that makes you dizzy”, largely because of the internet which had stripped away the taboos.
The newspaper arrived at the figure of one in four from a Rome-based organization called The International Federation for the Protection of Rights and Freedoms, also known as Federsex. The organization has 500,000 members who meet in 200 private clubs across Italy to swap partners. However, Federsex experts believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg, estimating the real figure to be closer to two million, which is about a quarter of the eight million sexually active couples in the country.
The average age of male participants is 43, while the swapped women tend to be younger at 35. This activity is no longer secretive and can even take place during one’s lunch hour, according to an employee of the Club Malizia in Milan. People from various professions, including accountants, doctors, footballers, and politicians, are reportedly involved in this lifestyle.
An investigation by La Stampa was prompted by the death of 27-year-old Dejan Delijevic, who was found hanging by his studded dog collar from a metal fence near the Magic Nuar club on the outskirts of Mantova. This incident raised national interest and led to discussions about sexual mores, similar to the soul-searching prompted by the case of Max Mosley.
According to La Stampa, clubs like Magic Nuar are not unusual and are part of the married life of many Italian couples. For example, Lara, who grew up in Catania, Sicily, felt suffocated by her traditional upbringing and was introduced to wife swapping by Luca, whom she met during her university education in Rome. Nowadays, Lara and her husband Luca leave the kids at home to have nights out involving group sex.
Quoting the infamous player Signor Casanova, “cultivating whatever gave pleasure to my senses was always the chief business of my life.” In modern times, the catchphrase might be, to quote one scambisti: “I love my husband. That is why I want to swap him.”
