In 1970, the Italian Parliament offered its people a right that may have once seemed unthinkable for the seat of the Catholic church, the very right that caused Henry VIII to depart from the church in 1534 and create the Church of England: the right to divorce. 

On December 1st, the bill, first introduced in 1965, was approved 319-286, per New York Times reporting at the time, calling it “one of the most bitterly contested changes of the postwar period.” It was the “12th attempt in 92 years to institute divorce in Italy,” supported by a range of leftist parties, from the Proletarian Socialists and Communists, and opposed, unsurprisingly, by the Christian Democrats and Neo-Fascist parties.