For Shame!

"Young lady," asks the stern policeman, "don't you know you can't wear a two-piece bathing suit on the beach?" "Why no," answers the girl; "which piece shall I take off?"

Some Romans laughed at this old joke last week. But buxom, 19-year-old Annamarie Proietti was too angry to smile. Annamarie is a waitress from Rome's Communist-filled slums who last week slipped off to swarming, breezy Ostia for an afternoon on the beach with her boy friend Mario. "We were lying there in the sun talking," she told a reporter later, "when somebody tapped me on the shoulder and said, 'Where do you think you are --in your bedroom?' There, leaning over us, was an ugly, sweating flatfoot with a big mustache. 'Beat it,' he said, 'and take off that scandalous bathing suit or else--' 'What do you mean?' I asked gently. Then he said there's a new order prohibiting indecent bathing suits and that I was a shameless girl. Why that dirty flatfoot wasn't even a Roman. My Mario says it's all the fault of that rowdy Christian Democrat Scelba, and the walloping that's in store for me when mama hears about it will be his fault too, the s.o.b."

Throughout Italy last week, many another sharp female tongue cut at strait-laced Minister of the Interior Scelba, and his month-old campaign for reform in dress. On city streets and sunlit strands, Scelba's conscientious cops cracked down on bra-top dresses and bathing suits. At Capri and the Lido, dazzling diapered beauties gazed nervously over their strapless shoulders, while the Socialist Avanti, affecting to hear the rustle of churchly robes behind the government's order, cried: "The first arrested will go down in history as martyrs . . ."

In the fashionable Street of the Converts, however, Rome's modistes, having no urge toward martyrdom, prudently removed all bare midriff garments from their display windows. "I have two-piece suits for anybody who asks for them," said matronly Teresa Spizzichino. "They're made so as to hold any bosom tightly and cover both navel and--er--lower hind parts." Just the same, she admitted, the one-piece variety might be better. "Eventually the ladies will take to them, not because they like them better, but simply because no woman wants to run unnecessary risks. Getting into trouble with the police may have very unpleasant consequences, since most men just love to play the part of the moralist where their own wives are concerned."

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