In September 2021, an old photograph re-emerged online, showing what appeared to be a police officer issuing a ticket to a woman wearing a bikini on a beach. On Reddit, one popular post described the picture as follows:
A police officer ticketing a woman for wearing a bikini on a beach, which was illegal at the time in Italy, 1950s.
The picture has been posted online many times in recent years, with similar or identical descriptions of the scene. Those descriptions were accurate, so we are issuing a rating of "True."
The photograph was taken on a beach in Rimini, in northern Italy, in September 1957. It is held in the Ullstein photograph archive, owned by the German company Axel Springer Syndicate. Ullstein told Snopes details were not available about the photographer who captured the scene.
Although we were not able to find the exact dates in question, bikinis were indeed banned from beaches in Italy during the 1950s, after the Vatican expressed its disapproval of the swimsuit, which was first marketed in 1946.
In the collection of the German agency AKG Images, the photo carries the following caption:
On the beach of Rimini (Adriatic coast, Italy): A carabinieri issues a penalty ticket to a young woman wearing a bikini.
