Concubinage--Italian Style

Short of shooting her, as in the movie Divorce--Italian Style, there is virtually no way for a man to shed his wife in divorceless Italy. Film Producer Carlo Ponti made a game try when he got a legal separation from his wife, arranged a Mexican divorce, and then went through a Mexican marriage with Actress Sophia Loren. But Italian authorities countered that gambit with ease: they recognized the marriage, not the divorce, and they hit Ponti with a bigamy charge. Sending lawyers to the defense on two continents, Ponti got a Mexican court to void his marriage to Sophia, and he asked the courts at home to agree that the ceremony had thus been erased from legal existence.

Last week Ponti got his answer. The Mexican marriage was no legal fiction, said a Rome civil court. It had in fact been annulled, but by contracting it in the first place, Ponti was still guilty of bigamy, though the court did not charge him with the crime. Almost as if he had expected the ruling, the producer had already started down another escape route: he has become a French citizen on the theory that the move will allow him to divorce his wife under French law and remarry Sophia.

The French Ponti, however, does not automatically cease being Italian. As it happens, Italy recognizes dual citizenship; some Italians (such as ex-soldiers) can never renounce their citizenship. If Italian courts fail to agree that Ponti has become a 100% Frenchman, marriage to Sophia may bring up the bigamy charge once more. Moreover, if he divorces his first wife in France, she will still be his legal wife in Italy.

Technical Sin. The problem is almost as old as Rome itself. The city's founder, Romulus, did allow men to sue for divorce, and the Emperor Justinian permitted it in return for vows of future chastity from each partner, but Mussolini's 1929 Concordat with the Vatican banished divorce entirely. The church courts do permit annulments--at the rate of about 70 a year. Another 12,000 couples win legal separations each year, but the separated remain bound in marriage. Not surprisingly, 2,500,000 Italians have chosen concubinage. About 10% of the entire population is now technically living in sin.

Il Duce himself followed the pattern when he took up with the beautiful Clara Petacci in place of his legal wife Rachele. It was in Clara's company that Mussolini was shot and hung by the heels by vengeful partisans. Italy's late Communist Party Boss Palmiro Togliatti left his wife to live openly with Comrade Leonilde Jotti; the couple even adopted a daughter. When Togliatti died last summer, Leonilde marched behind the coffin, while Signora Togliatti got lost in the crowd.

Not Known. As one result of the Italian practice of "stable concubinage," the registration papers of at least a million Italian children were marked with an "N.N." (for Nemini Notus, meaning roughly "Not known to anyone") that stamped the children for life. Finally a law was passed in 1955 erasing the demeaning stamp from every bastard's official documents.

Now, Ponti's acquisition of French citizenship has churned up a real fear that many others will soon follow him abroad. "Just imagine what would happen," asked one member of Parliament, "if all the 'irregulars' in the arts should follow Ponti's example!" It is an interesting thought, but in the face of church opposition, few Italian politicians of any party are anxious to fight out the issue. As Rome Lawyer Ercole Graziadei wryly puts it: "The day will come when England will adopt the metric system and China will use the Latin alphabet. But Italy will still forbid divorce."

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