Padua on Friday became the second big Italian city to boost fines for clients who use street prostitutes in a bid to clean up its image and strike at rackets that force women out on the streets.
Both Padua and Verona have now brought in fines of 500 euros for clients caught with streetwalkers thanks to greater powers given to city mayors by the government's emergency security decree.
''The security decree allows mayors to apply a range of fines from 50 to 500 euros, depending on the gravity of the behaviour of the person committing the crime,'' explained Verona Mayor Flavio Tosi, who increased fines on Wednesday.
''In this case we have decided to apply the maximum sanction of 500 euros for the violation of our anti-prostitution order: a deterrent that's much stronger than the 36 euros for holding up traffic circulation that mayors had to make do with before the security decree,'' Tosi said.
At the moment only the exploitation of prostitution - pimping - is illegal in Italy, but city mayors combat the phenomenon through the use of fines, often via road traffic or public decency laws.
One Italian mayor fined transsexual prostitutes under a 1931 law that forbids people from masking their real identity in public, while others have carried out naming-and-shaming campaigns, identifying clients in local newspapers and leaving wives and girlfriends to meet out punishment.
Padua was the first city to introduce an experimental scheme last year cracking down on clients and introducing fines of 50 euros, which resulted in prostitutes demonstrating against the measure in the streets and offering anyone slapped with a fine a ''free service''.
''We fined around 500 people under the scheme, but we've always said it wasn't effective because the sum was too low. Now with a sanction ten times higher we hope to see street prostitution reduced to zero,'' said Padua's city policing assessor Marco Carrai.
GOVERNMENT MULLS CRIMINALISING PROSTITUTION.
Although the centre-right government is mulling over plans to criminalise both soliciting and using prostitutes, these have yet to get out of the starting box.
Equal Opportunities Minister Mara Carfagna and Interior Minister Roberto Maroni co-authored a new prostitution bill in July which has still not been brought before cabinet for approval.
Under the bill, prostitutes and clients could be fined up to 3,000 euros, while repeat offences would be punishable with 5-15 days in jail - although prostitutes forced onto the streets by organised crime rings would not be prosecuted.
It also includes harsher penalties for pimps and those who have sex with minors, as well as ''assisted repatriation'' for minors without a legal guardian in Italy.
By targeting both clients and pimps as well as prostitutes, the bill is more comprehensive than an amendment to the emergency security decree proposed in June that was criticised for punishing streetwalkers alone.
The amendment - which was pulled from the decree under pressure from the opposition - would only have made soliciting a crime, while requiring the immediate repatriation of all foreign streetwalkers caught in the act.
Right-wing politician Daniela Santanche' is meanwhile convinced that reopening brothels is the only way of getting prostitutes of the streets.
In June she announced she would begin collecting the 500,000 signatures necessary for a referendum to overturn the 1958 Merlin law - named after bill sponsor and Socialist senator Angelina (Lina) Merlin - which closed down Italian brothels.
A survey for the Donna Moderna magazine in the same month showed that 85% of Italians are in favour of reopening brothels.
NINE MILLION CLIENTS IN ITALY.
According to a recent study there are some 100,000 prostitutes in Italy, 65% of whom work on the streets and 35% in private residences or clubs.
Most prostitutes were said to be foreigners, from some 60 different countries, 20% were minors and 10% were forced into prostitution by criminal gangs.
The study also calculated that prostitutes in Italy charge an average of 30 euros per customer and generate a turnover in the neighborhood of some 90 million euros a month.
Clients were said to number around nine million with 80% seeking unprotected sex.
