Don't lie to your lover about being single — at least not in Italy

Apparently in the country that produced the libertine legend Casanova, all is not fair in love and war after all.

This month, a high court in Italy found a man criminally responsible last week for lying to his lover that he was single.

The man was in a double bind. He’d got his wife and lover pregnant within weeks of each other. But before impregnating his lover, who was growing impatient with his promises of leaving his wife, he produced divorce papers.

They were fakes. And shoddy fakes at that — a detail the high court judges chose not to ignore.

In finding the man guilty of forgery, they also esthetically condemned his cut-and-paste job of his divorce papers as “unrefined.”

Under Italian law, fathers are required to support their offspring, whether produced inside or out of marriage. So the court decision did not stem from financial concern for the newly single-mother lover. It was a clear verdict of criminal guilt.

Which, frankly, seems a more Protestant than Roman Catholic decision, and particularly puzzling in a country where affairs are viewed more as a likely consequence of marriage than its biggest threat.

In Italy, long-married couples casually refer to una storia (a love affair) in the not-too-distant past in the way North Americans recall a particularly pleasant holiday in a far-off land.

Even my Italian mother-in-law still waxes admiringly about the stylish hairdo sported by her married brother’s lover, whom she entertained in the 1960s when his wife was at the seaside.

Where I grew up in Canada, that woman would have been chased from the neighbourhood with a hockey stick.

So why the apparent shift in legal values with this high court decision?

Very likely, it was the imminent arrival of un bambino.

Pregnancy makes a big difference

“It was the woman’s pregnancy that made them go after him,” says Sally Silvers, an American lawyer in Rome who spends much of her time interpreting Italian financial law for American clients, and interpreting Americans to Italians.

Silvers points out that Italy takes parental financial responsibility very seriously. She notes that unlike in North America, where parents are required to support their kids until adulthood, in Italy, that responsibility does not legally end until the offspring are financially independent.

Which, in some cases, means never.

This has led to a string of court cases involving children in their late 20s suing their parents for support, though as Silvers points out, most of those cases involve a divorced couple where one is fobbing off the support of the stay-at-home adult child, dubbed “un mammone” in Italy, on the other.

In the case of the man lying to his lover, he was found criminally guilty of misrepresenting himself.

‘They got him on impersonation’

“Essentially they got him on impersonation. He impersonated someone who was divorced and able to marry,” says Silvers.

While being found criminally guilty of impersonation usually presupposes financially ripping someone off, that’s not always the case.

“He got other benefits, sex and affection,” says Silvers.

This month’s verdict, however, hardly indicates a moralistic trend in Italian high court rulings. Another court decision recently deemed it illegal to spy on a partner’s cellphone, a ruling that would seem to favour cheaters.

And last fall, the high court considered one man’s right to watch porn at work during his lunch break.

In that verdict, judges wrote that the employer, car giant Fiat, could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that during work hours the man “dedicated himself” to watching the filmino or “little porn film.”

Unlike the lover who impersonated a freshly divorced man, the Fiat worker won the case, no doubt returning to work with his head held high.