The Joy of Cinquecento

An Italian-American friend of mine who shall remain nameless saw the earlier post on the new and improved Fiat 500, which could be sold in America thanks to the Italian automaker's merger with Chrysler, and just had to fill us in on one of the more popular uses of the original 500.

"The Cinquecento is a tiny car but it has long been the Volkswagen of Italy. If you had a car it was most likely that you had a Cinquecento from the '50s until relatively recently. Since Italy has always been in an economic and social straight jacket, that's meant that a Cinquecento was the only living space that many young people had. Ergo, the only place they could have sex outside of their parent's houses. And that meant that someone once produced a brilliant manual on all the sexual positions possible within a Cinquecento.

I saw these when I was in Italy and the amazing thing was that they were entirely practical and had only the smallest prurient value. It was an old beat up manual that my Italian cousins had. At first I thought it was just something one of them had but then someone from an entirely different branch of the family had the same samizdat book and other people told me that they or their parents had them as well."

A prudish Italian judge officially banned car sex in 1999, prompting Riccardo Schicchi, manager of Italian porn start La Cicciolina, to attack the verdict: "Making love in cars has its own history and dignity," he declared.

No word on whether the manual was reissued along with the updated Fiat 500.