‘Forgive Me, Love…It Was Stronger than I am’: Negotiating Intimacy and Sexuality

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores intimacy and sexuality in courtship. The ordinary experiences of the diaries and memoirs are set against the (somewhat) differing codes of morality dictated by the Catholic Church, the Communist Party (PCI), and mass culture so that we can see how people often measured their choices and experiences against their ideas of how a model man or woman should behave. We see how the rituals, rules, and surveillance common in upper- and middle-class courtships in the 1950s often left little room for intimacy. Meanwhile, the piazza, a common site of courtship in most towns and cities, was all too often about display rather than real communication. By the late 1950s, the economic boom was beginning to open up new spaces of leisure and intimacy for young Italians, particularly the beach and the car. As couples began to spend more time out of the home together, courtship was becoming both more public and more private, with these new spaces providing more space for intimacy and sexuality, with increasingly shared leisure and communication between the sexes.