From the Sexual Question to the Praise of Prostitution: Modernism and Sexual Politics in Florence, 1908–1914

Between 1908 and the outbreak of the First World War, a group of young Italian intellectuals gathered around the modernist Florentine magazines La voce (The voice, published between 1908 and 1916) and Lacerba (published between 1913 and 1915) were catapulted to the center of public attention because of their reflections on sexuality.¹ The initiative to discuss sexuality had its origin in La voce’s earliest issues, increased in intensity during February 1910 due to a special issue dedicated to the “sexual question,” and reached its height in a Convegno per la questione sessuale (Congress on the sexual question) organized by La voce in Florence in November 1910. This event garnered national attention: it attracted the interest of heterogeneous cultural groups, well-known intellectuals and politicians attended, and the national press widely covered it. For three days, hundreds of attendants from different intellectual, ideological, and regional backgrounds convened in Florence in order to discuss sex education, birth control, and the celibacy of Catholic priests.

Despite the major impact of the congress, the sexual question gradually disappeared from the pages of La voce. Issues of sexuality, however, soon reappeared from an alternative perspective in the journal Lacerba, which was founded by intellectuals and artists connected to La voce but more influenced by the Milan-based and highly iconoclastic futurist avant-garde. Beginning in early 1913, Lacerba published a series of articles attacking conventional sexual morality and defending libertinism and homosexuality. The campaign achieved momentum with the publication of the article “Elogio della prostituzione” (Praise for prostitution) in May 1913 by a young and unknown collaborator named Italo Tavolato, who had recently arrived from Trieste. When Tavolato was prosecuted for obscenity for this article, he made a sudden leap into celebrity, and both Tavolato and Lacerba received much public attention. During the months preceding the trial, indeed, Tavolato profited from this sudden interest in his work and published a booklet titled Contro la morale sessuale (Against sexual morality). Even though the scant twenty-three-page booklet disappointed those who had high intellectual expectations from him, its editorial success was significant, and Tavolato enjoyed a short period of fame before the First World War moved the interest of modernist intellectuals out of sexuality and into campaigning for Italy’s intervention in the war.²

The rising interest in the “sexual question” among these groups of Italian modernists was part of a growing concern with sexuality that swept across Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. Certainly, historians of gender and sexuality have convincingly pointed to the late nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century as a crucial moment in the emergence of sexuality as a realm of research and social concern. The emergence of sexology as a specific discipline for studying sexuality; the organization of movements and trends of opinion favoring birth control and neo-Malthusianism; the growth of demographic anxieties linked to eugenic theories; the increasing influence of feminism; the different responses to and attitudes toward prostitution; the regulation, repression, theorization, and defense of homosexuality; and the articulation of the first movements of sexual and family reform constitute fundamental subjects in the research on gender and sexuality at the turn of the century. Studies on sexuality during this period, in addition, have enriched our knowledge of particular intellectuals and social movements by connecting their multiple responses and attitudes toward gender and sexuality to major social processes such as urbanization, industrialization, the spread of nationalism, and the proliferation of new disciplines connected to new technologies of power.³

Although most studies on turn-of-the-century sexuality focus on England, France, and Germany, the study and regulation of sexuality were also intense in Italy during this time, and many intellectuals, professionals, and state officials developed original strategies on issues concerning sexuality. Together with a long-term interest in controlling and regulating prostitution, at the end of the nineteenth century Italy witnessed an increasing deployment of discourses and practices regarding the control of venereal diseases, the role of sexuality in...