In 1963, Pier Paolo Pasolini was traveling across Italy looking for locations for his next film. As often happens in the middle of creative wandering, the trip slipped into another idea he’d been carrying with him for a while: a documentary on the sexual education of Italians.
When Comizi d’Amore (Love Meetings, 1965) finally came out, it caused a small cultural earthquake. For the first time in Italy, a film dared to step into territory still considered taboo—even among the supposedly liberal. From bourgeois holiday destinations to rural villages, Pasolini and his crew trekked across the peninsula interviewing anyone willing to stop: farmers, factory workers, soldiers, students, writers, commuters, train conductors—even a surprisingly prudish soccer team.
The timing was eerily precise. With the intuitive radar that would come to define him, Pasolini sensed Italy was shifting underfoot. Within just a few years, the social upheavals—culminating in 1968—would force the country to confront questions raised by the women’s movement, student collectives, and emerging LGBTQAI+ activism. Customs and morals were about to flip.
And by the 1970s, largely thanks to feminist efforts, they did. Divorce arrived in 1970; abortion became legal eight years later. The contraceptive pill was approved in 1971. In 1975, family law was rewritten and adultery was finally removed from the list of criminal offenses. But back in the early ’60s, almost no one could have predicted this future—though hints had already begun appearing in the cinema. Pietro Germi’s Divorce Italian Style (1961) and Seduced and Abandoned (1964), and Mario Monicelli’s The Girl with the Pistol (1968) teased the anxieties and obsessions of the era: premarital sex and torrid affairs spiraling into crimes of passion, honor-bound families, and farcical kidnappings.
These films were exaggerated, but not entirely far-fetched—especially in rural Italy, where the law still allowed reduced sentences for murdering an adulterous spouse, framing the act as a restoration of family honor. The infamous delitto d’onore (honor killing) remained legal until just 40 years ago.
Comizi d’Amore was Pasolini’s attempt to make sense of all this. What he found was a country starved for intimacy and, as he put it, “with absolutely no general ideas on sexuality.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly then, the conversations in the documentary, most often, centered around marriage; homosexuality lies in the vague category of “abnormality.” Abortion isn’t mentioned at all. The 1958 Merlin Law—which shut down regulated brothels—is debated in scenes filmed in Naples and Palermo. “What will become of our country?” asks an elderly woman railing against divorce. She sounds uncannily like certain senators opposing LGBTQAI+ rights today.
Italy’s patriarchal reflexes, the North–South divide, and deep-seated class distinctions all surface. Against the shine of the postwar economic boom, an older and more archaic culture reveals itself. “Prosperous Italy is dramatically contradicted by these real Italians,” the documentary concludes.
Even Pasolini’s own friends struggled to speak directly about their sex lives. Giuseppe Ungaretti offers a beautifully evasive reflection on “what it means to be against nature,” sidestepping any explicit mention of sexuality with poetic elegance.
Fast forward 60 years, and the landscape has changed—mostly.
The last major nationwide study on sexuality dates to 2006, but in 2017 a questionnaire given to 8,000 students born around 1998 offered a snapshot of a new Italy. The Selfy survey (Sexual and Emotional Life of Youths) shows that the behavior of Italian millennials is aligning with their European peers. Regional differences have almost entirely flattened. Marriage is no longer a defining milestone for straight couples, though it remained a central demand for gay couples until civil unions were recognized in 2016.
Young Italians now have their first sexual experiences earlier than those at the start of the 2000s, and they do so more safely. They also cheat less: a large majority believes infidelity contradicts the very idea of a relationship.
Perhaps most strikingly, sexuality is no longer tied to hedonism. Casual encounters are declining. A different sensibility is emerging—one that feels, strangely enough, more romantic.
Are we witnessing the return of capital-R romance?
Whatever the answer, Pasolini’s closing words of Comizi D’Amore hold true:
“To your love, let there be added awareness of your love.”
