Adelina Tattilo

Who was Adelina Tattilo?

Adelina Tattilo is acknowledged to be a pioneer in the Italian erotic magazine publishing sector, who contributed to change the social customs Italy from the second half the 1960s. By launching Playmen, Tattilo engaged publishers like Hugh Hefner and Larry Flynt in an ideological battle to liberate sexual attitudes and free them from bigotry and false moralisms.

In the 1960s, Tattilo launched Menelik, a successful weekly magazine of erotic comic strips, featuring the character 'Bernarda'. This periodical came to sell up to 100,000 copies each week. In 1965 Tattilio and her husband, later separated, broke into publishing with a weekly called Big, a magazine for teenage boys, which answered questions of curiosity about sex, reaching sales approaching 400,000 per week. A year later they started Men, a weekly collection of photographs of nude women purchased from Scandinavia or provided by Italian modeling agents. Playmen was founded in 1967, and looked similar to Playboy, which was then banned in Italy. Tattilio reported that Playmen cost $US 640,000 to launch, in 1967, and it had risen to an estimated net worth of $1,600,000 in as soon as 1971.