Italy is the home of wife swapping

Married couples flocking to the Tuscan countryside or the Eternal City this summer might want to think twice before accepting that generous dinner party invitation from the welcoming Italian couple. They might get more than they bargained for. If a new report is to be believed, it seems a quarter of all Italian couples regularly take part in wife swapping.

The revelation comes not from the seedier quarters of the country that gave the world Casanova, but from the usually po-faced pages of national broadsheet La Stampa. According to yesterday's front page article, entitled "The Lunch Time Swingers", an estimated 500,000 Italian couples are officially swapping partners at private sex clubs, with thousands more doing it in a more ad-hoc fashion in car parks, specially designated beaches or even cemeteries.

The La Stampa article, primly struggling with whether to call this new Italian predilection a "passion" or a "hobby", said wife swapping had increased everywhere "at a rate that makes you dizzy", largely because of the internet which had stripped away the taboos.

The source with which the newspaper arrived at the one-in-four figure was a Rome-based body called The International Federation for the Protection of Rights and Freedoms, or Federsex, for short. The organisation has 500,000 members that meet in 200 private clubs across Italy and swap partners, but the Federsex experts believe that is just the tip of the iceberg. They put the real figure closer to two million, or a quarter of the eight million sexually active couples across the country.