MILAN — The exhibitors at what was billed as Italy’s first divorce trade fair, held here over the weekend, were a predictable mishmash of lawyers, real estate agents, divorce planners, paternity testing centers and dating agencies.
No less predictable was the media scrum, come to record the latest seismic transformation of Italian society, a mostly Roman Catholic nation traditionally centered on the family.
That stereotype is fading fast.
In 2007, according to the most recent statistics available, there were more than 81,000 separations and 50,000 divorces among Italy’s population of 59 million. Thirty years ago, divorces did not break the 12,000 mark.
Lifelong marriages and close-knit family “values are great, but women have begun to live a different reality,” said Lorenza Lucianer, a twice-separated office worker who came to the fair with two friends. “We’ve turned into America. Everyone is on their second marriage. It happened later here, but it happened.”
Yet it is not quite like America.
For antsy Italian singles-in-waiting, American divorce laws (at least of the cinematic variety, where marriages are dissolved in the time it takes for ink to dry) are the stuff that dreams are made of. In Italy, divorces take around five years from the first separation hearing, said Claudio De Filippi, a lawyer who had a booth at the fair.
His firm, he said, was challenging Italy’s divorce laws at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, because in most European countries a divorce takes around one year. “But, of course, we have the Vatican here,” he said. “Divorce has tended to be viewed as an extreme measure.”
Italy ratified divorce only in 1974 in a referendum, and critics complain that Italian legislators have not kept up with changing times.
For example, Italy fine-tuned its joint custody legislation in 2006, but “la mamma” still ends up doing most of the child rearing, according to Umberto Vaghi, a real estate agent and advocate with the I Love Papá Association, which organizes an annual Daddy’s Pride Parade in Rome and fights for the rights of fathers and minors.
He said his association has been “battling a cultural problem that discriminates against men and women,” because it “presupposes that children will stay with their mothers. And that forces mothers into a role that might not let them do other things in life,” he said.
The growing divorce rate is what led Milena Stojkovic two years ago to open what she claims to be Italy’s first divorce planning agency, Ciao Amore. (“Ciao means both hello and goodbye in Italian,” she said, adding that she “wanted to give the idea of ‘I never want to see you again,’ and ‘this isn’t necessarily a goodbye.’ ”) With offices in Rome and Trieste, a branch is expected to open in Milan soon, she said. “Divorce planning was a very new concept in Italy,” she said, but the business has been satisfying.
And now, a trade fair. It was held in the basement of a large business hotel.
According to Franco Zanetti, the journalist turned impresario behind the event, Vienna was the first European capital to hold a divorce fair two years ago. “It was also in a hotel,” he said. “Really Viennese, everything behind closed doors.”
A Parisian version last December “was too sociological and ideological” and open to widows and widowers, which he said would not have gone down as well in Italy.
Mr. Zanetti said he had “no ideological vocation” toward divorce (in his mid-50s, he got married only four years ago), but he has experience in designing trade fairs for the public.
The potential economic implications of a growing divorce rate were not lost on the Slovenian Tourist Board, which, especially for the fair, quickly put together “regenerative weekends” that could — but need not — include cosmetic treatments for “fresh divorcées,” at several spas, said Maja Slivnjak, a tourist board representative. (We are, she added, “the only country that has love in its name.”)
Slovenia is a short drive from many major Italian cities. “We used to focus on couples and families,” but divorcées are “a very interesting market,” she said.
Divorcées were not out in big numbers on Saturday afternoon, but those who came had specific agendas.
Virna Modena, a divorced wedding planner from Modena, said she had come to the fair “to see the other side of the coin.” And to check out its commercial potential. “Perhaps it’s a better business to be in,” she said.
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