A mistress may lie under oath without committing perjury in order to protect her honour, Italian judges have ruled.

The Court of Cassation, the highest appeal court in the country, has cleared a 48-year-old woman who was convicted previously of giving false testimony to police.

The woman, known only as Carla under Italian privacy laws, had denied lending her mobile phone to her lover, Giovanni. He was convicted of abusive behaviour after using the phone to make threatening calls to her estranged husband. His mistress was found guilty of conspiracy.

The ruling by a local court at Grossetto was overturned by the Court of Cassation yesterday, appearing to strike a blow for old-fashioned, Italian-style adultery. Judges ruled that “the fact of having a lover is a circumstance which causes injury to a person’s honour in a family and a social context”. It was, therefore, legitimate to lie “if the intention is to conceal an extra-conjugal relationship”, even in a judicial investigation.

It is not clear whether the ruling also applies to men with mistresses.

The judges said that Carla, from Porto Ecole on the Tuscan coast, had lied not only to protect her honour but also because the revelation that she had a lover could have affected her legal battle with her husband over their separation. “You do not lend your mobile phone to someone unless you have a particularly close relationship with them,” the ruling said.

The Court of Cassation, which is staffed mainly by elderly male appeal judges, has issued several controversial judgments on sexual and social mores in the past decade.

They include the ruling, which was rescinded after protests from Italian feminists, that a woman could not be raped if she was wearing tight jeans because the jeans could be removed only with her consent.

Last month the court ruled that men who touch their genitals in public are committing a criminal offence. Under an age-old custom Italian men sometimes grasp their crotches as a protection against bad luck and the evil eye, for example if a funeral procession passes by.

The judges, however, upheld a lower court sentencing of a 42-year-old workman from Como for indecent behaviour after “ostentatiously touching his genitals through his clothing”.

The appeal court said that this was “an act contrary to public decency and potentially offensive to collectively held feelings of decorum”. They ordered the man to pay a ¤200 (£155) fine and ¤1,000 costs and rejected the defence by his lawyer that he was only “adjusting his overalls”.

In recent years courts in Italy have handed down a series of controversial and sometimes contradictory rulings on marriage and adulterous relationships. It is only three years since the repeal of a law that made adultery punishable by up to six years in prison, a law that, in practice, is applied to women only. Legal observers say that this possibly reflects the strong hold that older people, and thus outdated attitudes, have on Italian society.

Silvio Berlusconi, whom the polls suggest will be the next Italian leader, is 71 years old.

Those same courts can sometimes be surprisingly protective towards women who find themselves subject to harrassment. The Court of Cassation ordered an obsessively jealous husband not only to leave the marital home but also to move to another town to stop him trying to control his wife’s every move.

The cost of infidelity

Adultery remains an offence in many states in the US. In Maryland it is a misdemeanour that is still punishable by a $10 fine and in New York the law — last used in 1944 — allows for 90 days in prison and a $100 fine

A 28-year-old woman was put on trial for adultery in Wisconsin in 1990. She faced up to two years in jail and a $10,000 fine

Seeing the extravagance and debauchery of his capital city, the Roman Emperor Augustus determined to clean things up by making infidelity punishable by exile, and by permitting fathers to kill their daughters and partners if they were caught commiting adultery. His resolve was tested when Julia, his daughter, was caught cheating. She was exiled to Pandateria, a barren island

Under the 1803 French Napoleonic laws, adultery was a ground for divorce for men but a woman could cite infidelity only if her husband brought his mistress to live inside the family home

Prenuptial agreements now often contain clauses stipulating penalties if a partner strays. Before her marriage to Michael Douglas, the actress Catherine Zeta-Jones reportedly negotiated a $5 million payoff if he cheated on her

Sources: Mount Holyoke College, UNRV History, Encyclopedia Britannica, Fox News

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