Loris Fortuna

Loris Fortuna

Consumed by passion for his beautiful 16-year-old cousin, Angela, the languid, droopy-eyed Sicilian nobleman, Baron Ferdinand ‘Fefè’ Cefalù decides he must have her at any cost. His big problem is that he is married to a woman with a moustache, Rosalia, with whom

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Thu 26 Jul 2007 12:00 AM

Consumed by passion for his beautiful 16-year-old cousin, Angela, the languid, droopy-eyed Sicilian nobleman, Baron Ferdinand ‘Fefè’ Cefalù decides he must have her at any cost. His big problem is that he is married to a woman with a moustache, Rosalia, with whom he is totally bored. He wants to remarry, but cannot because there is no divorce in Italy. The only way out, as he sees it, is to try and make his wife fall in love with another man so that he can catch her in his arms, murder her, and then get off with a light sentence for committing an ‘honour’ killing.

 

This is the plot of the bitingly satirical Divorzio all’italiana (‘Divorce, Italian Style’), the film directed by Pietro Germi, released in 1961. The first of very few foreign films to win the Academy Award for best writing, story and screenplay, it was a comedy. But, in that period, for many thousands of Italians locked into unhappy marriages or living in new relationships without any of the legal rights that came with marriage for their partners and children, it was not so funny.

 

In 1965, an Italian Socialist Party parliamentarian, Loris Fortuna, prepared his first draft of a law on divorce, the 15th divorce measure to have been proposed in Italy since 1878. He did not present it immediately but lobbied for support in and outside Parliament as the principal member of the Italian Divorce League. By 1970, his bill had gained that support from the Italian Communist Party, the Radical Party and the left wing. Despite strong opposition from the Christian Democrat Party and the Vatican, he, together with the Liberal Member of Parliament, Antonio Baslini, finally presented the bill. It passed on 1st December 1970, with 319 votes in favour and 286 against it.

A criminal lawyer by profession but a social reformer by mission, Fortuna was born in Breno, near Brescia in 1924. He fought as a partisan during World War II and had initially joined the Italian Communist Party. After the revolts in Hungary were so harshly suppressed by the Soviet Army in 1956, he left the Communist Party and joined the Socialists. He was a minister in the Craxi government at the time of his death, of cancer, in 1985, at 61 years of age.

 

Under his divorce law, when the ‘spiritual and material communion between the couple could not be maintained or reconstructed’, the pair could, on certain grounds (but, not specifically, for adultery) obtain a divorce after being legally separated for five years (reduced to three years in 1987), if they both agreed to the separation and, if not, after six or seven years.

 

Backed by the Catholic Church and the Christian Democrat Party, conservative forces in the country, led by the National Committee for the Referendum on Divorce, campaigned to have the law repealed. After they had collected over 1,300,000 signatures, the first abrogative referendum in the history of the Italian Republic was held on 12 May 1974. The number of people who voted was extraordinary. Of the almost 90 percent turnout at the polls, 59.3 percent voted ‘no’ to repealing the divorce law against only 40.7 percent who voted ‘yes’.

 

Today, according to OECD statistics published in 2006, Italy has one of the lowest divorce rates in Europe. Only about 13.2 percent of married couples will eventually divorce after a marriage that has usually survived quite a long time (16.7 years) before the couple definitively parts company.

Fortuna is also known for sponsoring the legislation on abortion, which was passed in 1978. This, too, was fought by the Vatican and was submitted to referendum vote in 1981. Once again, the law survived, with only 32 percent of Italians voting to repeal it.

 

Not by chance, on 12 May 2007, the date of the anniversary of the divorce referendum, the ‘Family Day’ demonstration was held in Piazza San Giovanni in Rome to protest against DICO, the acronym for Diritto e doveri delle persone stabilmente Conviventi (‘Rights and duties of persons who are permanently cohabiting’) or, in other words, the name commonly given to the bill to extend certain legal rights to cohabiting couples, even same-sex couples, now before the Italian Parliament. Yet again two opposing fractions within the country—the religious conservatives and lay liberals—are locked in battle, as they were for the laws on divorce and abortion. Only time will tell which will triumph.

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