Abstract
Josephine Butler knew Italy quite well, visited the country several times, and was in contact with members of its cultural and political elite. The movement against regulated prostitution that she helped to create failed, however, to gain any significant results and regulated prostitution was abolished in Italy only in 1958. The article analyses the reasons for this lack of success by looking both at the characteristics of the Italian abolitionist movement and the role of Butler, and at the more general transformation of Italian society in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the rise of cultural nationalism limited the influence of foreign examples.
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