45 Years of Naturism in Italy

There's little nude news going on in Asia or Taiwan, apart from the fact that Taiwanese model Lin Chia-chi, also known as Patina Lin, recorded a commercial for computer games while wearing nothing but gold liquid, if we believe local television reports. On TV, it looked more like she was wearing a golden bra.

Anyway, I received another issue of the Italian naturist association magazine Info Naturista, and this time it tells of the 45th anniversary of the organized naturist movement in the Mediterranean country.

While Italy is known around the world for its sunshine, its brilliant cuisine and its many beaches on one of the world's most beautiful seas, naturism unfortunately has not had an easy time.

A group of Italians first became aware of naturism in the early 1960s by visiting the famours Ile du Levant off France's Cote d'Azur, an island wellknown even to non-naturists. Later, they traveled to Corsica before deciding to set up a movement of their own in Italy. Only, when it was founded in 1964, the first Italian naturist organization actually put its headquarters in ... Zurich, in neighboring Switzerland. It wasn't until 1969 that the movement transferred its offices to Turin, the main city in Northwest Italy. That year also saw another major development: the opening of the first naturist center on Italian soil, Le Betulle, in the same region as Turin.

While many Italians now count themselves as naturists, the number of beaches and resorts is still limited and under threat. Most Italians go naturists in neighboring countries, in particular Croatia and France, two of the most naturist-friendly countries in the world.

In Italy itself, the mayor of Ravenna, the city famous for its Byzantine churches, wants to close down the beach known as Lido di Dante or Bassona, for more than 20 years a popular place for naturists. Oddly enough, the mayor hails from Italy's main party of the left, the Democratic Party, which you would expect to be more respectful of alternative lifestyles and freedom of expression.

The threat to Ravenna's naturist beach also reflects the problem of current legislation, which says nudity is not wrong on beaches "often frequented" by naturists. The problem is that local governments can decide on their own whether beaches are often frequented or not. Naturists want to move closer to the Spanish or Danish situations, so nudity would be allowed on any beach not specifically "reserved for various use," as the magazine puts it.

One positive sign on the horizon for naturism in Italy: the Pizzo Greco naturist holiday center will host the World Congress of the International Naturist Federation this September 8 to 12. The meeting is bound to attract media attention to the cause.

To return to the Info Naturista magazine and to continue on a positive note, the edition also includes a report on the official foundation of an Italian naturist youth movement, the Giovani Italiani Naturisti. Naturists are sometimes pictured in the mainstream media as a bunch of old people practicing a dying tradition.

The magazine also reports on the documentary Naked Conversations with Nude Women by Thomas Lundy, a naturist resort in the small town of Igarata just one hour away from the Brazilian megalopolis of Sao Paulo, and an essay on the normality of naturism by Pino Fiorella. Naturism's cultural principle of respecting all persons is the epitome of accepting normality, he writes.

Finally, a list of relevant web links:

www.fenait.org

www.mirantedoparaiso.com.br

www.iledulevant.com.fr

www.pizzogreco.com

Italy 2009

The latest edition of the Italian naturist magazine Info Naturista www.infonaturista.org, the official publication of the Italian Naturist Federation www.fenait.org tumbled into my mailbox again recently.
The opening editorial seems to do away with the classic differentiation between naturists and nudists, where the former are often environmentalists, vegetarians, peace activists, followers of natural medicine opposed to consumerism and alcohol, and the latter are just people who take their clothes off but keep all their other vices intact.
The difference doesn't matter, the editorial says, as long as all followers respect their bodies, each other, and the environment. The main expression of naturism is nudism, the article says.
The latest issue of the magazine has general writings of a philosophical nature as well as straightforward holiday reports - such as one bilingual English-Italian report about the Vritomartis resort on the less-frequent southern coast of Crete. The naturist hotel has no fewer than six - 6! - beaches in the neighborhood where naturism is the norm. You can find more information at www.vritomartis.gr, even though that part of the world will be mostly considered too remote for us residents of Asia. Pont Rouge in the Canadian province of Quebec might be a more likely destination.
The magazine concludes with the reviews of the activities of Italy's regional naturist organizations, including the everlasting campaign to keep the Lido di Dante beach near the historic town of Ravenna in nudist hands. There is also an extensive review of the naturist resort Le Betulle near Turin, which is run by the head of Italian naturism himself, Gianfranco Ribolzi.
If only Asia could have such naturist resorts and beaches, and such naturist magazines.

Italy Again

The latest copy of the Italian naturist magazine Info Naturista arrived in my mailbox.

Inside, a far too short report telling me that the Croatian naturist resort of Valalta celebrated its 40th anniversary. Forty years, that means it was opened in 1968, in what was then the communist country of Yugoslavia. Communism always used to have this image of being very conservative and prude, but Yugoslavia was certainly an exception, welcoming naturists with open arms that long ago.

I had the pleasure of staying at Valalta, near the picturesque town of Rovinj in northern Croatia, in 2004. It was a great experience, and I only wished there were resorts like that closer to East Asia.

Back to the Italian magazine: other articles mention a swimming competition, the naturist author Pino Fiorella, a proposal for a law on naturism at the Italian parliament - now there's good news - the publication of a book on naturism in Italian by Monia D'Ambrosio under the title "Il Corpo Nudo - Sociologia della Nudita" or "The Nude Body - Sociology of Nudity" which you can find at the publisher http://www.sylviaedizioni.it/. The magazine also has a theoretical article about naturism which also describes the early history of the movement in Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The battle to keep a beach with the poetic name of Lido di Dante near the historic city of Ravenna on Italy's east coast in naturist hands is apparently still continuing, with Info Naturista publishing an open letter to the city's mayor. The campaign will sound familiar to activists worried about similar changes for some famous U.S., Canadian or Australian beaches. The magazine closes with some funny cartoons, including one in which a naturist wife berates her husband for watching a TV show with footage of 'textile' women dancing.