In the Duchy of Asola, in Piedmont, a regulation was established that a mother could disinherit her daughter for leading a vicious life, but she lost this privilege if it was proved that she had connived at her immorality. The father had equal authority, but with one curious limitation. When, says the law, a father has sought to marry his daughter, and has endowed her sufficiently, if she refuses to marry and becomes a prostitute, he may cut her off; but if he have opposed her marriage until she has reached the age of twenty-five, and she then become a libertine, he can not refuse to bequeath her his property; and the woman, on every opportunity to marry, is bound to present herself before her father and demand his consent. If he refused it, he was not allowed to punish her in cases where, at the age of thirty, she became a harlot. The efforts to root out prostitution from houses and neighborhoods in Italy had, as elsewhere, the result of driving loose women to places of public resort. The baths were regularly frequented in every city in the Peninsula (hence the use of the word _bagnio_, as expressive of a disreputable place), so that there was scarcely a bath-keeper who was not also a brothel-keeper. In Avignon, which, in consequence of the schism of the popes, may be considered a second Rome, a statute of the Church, in 1441, interdicted to the priests and clergy the use of certain baths, notorious as brothels. The license of prostitution was soon taken away in Avignon. The residence of the popes in that city had attracted a concourse of strangers from all parts of the globe, and brothels sprung up at the doors of the churches, and close to the papal residence and bishops' palaces. They brought so much scandal on the community that an edict was passed driving prostitutes out of the city. In endeavoring to investigate the condition of prostitution in modern Italy, our inquiries and researches have been almost profitless, from the dearth of reliable statistical information as to any part of that most interesting country. In the fine arts, and in certain departments of abstract science, the republic of letters can show numerous records of Italy's state and progress. In all that tells of the people, their condition, their relations to each other, and their rulers, the statements of writers, both native and foreign, are so contradictory, so imbued with party passions and prejudices, or so flippantly careless and inaccurate, that we must peruse them with constant suspicion. At the same time, official documents are so sparingly given to the world that it is hopeless to fall back upon them.[225]