Many years ago, in Venice, I met a girl. Actually no, that's not true. I met two girls. And I was with two friends. There was a degree of jostling. We didn't talk about it, we British men. We just circled, nonchalantly, and squired them to galleries for the best part of a week.

We plied them with cheap Italian wine and told amusing tales. They laughed, threw back their long hair, touched us intimately on the forearms, and then bogged off, really quite abruptly, with a pair of 3ft tall, purring, hirsute dwarfs who roared up on a Vespa while we were chastely admiring some sort of fountain. That was that. Never saw them again. Never heard a peep.

That's how long it takes an Italian to steal your woman. Thirty seconds. I know. I've seen. And yet, in New Scientist, researchers from Bradley University, Illinois, suggest that, of all major Western nations, southern Europeans have less casual sex than almost anybody. Out of the 15 countries that they surveyed, Britain came top. Italy came eleventh, Spain was thirteenth, Greece fourteenth and Portugal came fifteenth. This is a surprise.

I'm prepared to concede that the Greeks and Portuguese may have been somewhat riding on the coat-tails of others in the romance stakes. But Casanova, it is worth remembering, was from Venice, not Vauxhall. Those star-cross'd lovers were Romeo and Juliet, not Roger and Julie.

Along the coast in Spain, they even have a word, piropo, that refers to a special sort of flirtatious, poetic compliment. “If beauty were a sin,” a Spaniard might ooze, for example, “you'd never be forgiven.” And still, if this survey is to be believed, hardly anybody wants to shag him. What has happened to the Latin lover? Is southern Europe suffering an existential crisis?

“We hope that Italy is still a romantic nation,” says a spokesman from the Italian Embassy. “Promiscuity and romance are different things. In Italy, family values are still considered important: in fact, statistics show that the rate of divorce and the percentage of kids born out of wedlock are still far below other European countries. So we are not surprised to discover that we rank so low regarding sexual promiscuity.”

Oh yeah? Well that's probably because you never had your bird nicked by a diminutive ponce on a moped, mate. Isn't promiscuity the whole point of southern Europe? From the catwalks of Milan to a leery grope from a gondolier, isn't getting some what a visit to Italy is meant to be all about? Aren't women going to be cancelling their holidays in disgust?

“No,” says Alessandra from the Italian state tourist board, sounding, it must be said, a little put out. “We have lots of inquiries about honeymoons. Or people who want to go somewhere to pop the question. Italy is more about romantic love. Rather than a place to...have fun.”

But, damn it, what about the masters of seduction? What about the Latin lover? Has he never been real?

“Italian men have this idea of being Latin men, and handsome and well-dressed,” concedes Alessandra. “But Italy is not a place for sexual tourism.”

Not even for women?

“No.”

Hmmm. A century ago the budding Fascist Filippo Marinetti evidently felt differently. Woman is a “half-tamed beast who lovingly dreams of betraying her adored male” he wrote in his book, Come si seducono le donne (How to seduce women), in which he attempted to stir up nationalist pride by reminding Italians that they were the best and most seductive lovers on the planet. “What does a man need to seduce women?” wrote the Italian futurist. “He should have all the qualities of an Italian futurist!”

Has something changed? According to David Schmitt, one of those researchers from Bradley University, one major factor in the national promiscuity stakes can be the ratio of men to women. If there are lots of women and only a few men, casual sex tends to rise. This is because the men, being in demand, tend to call the shots, and casual sex is what they are after.

According to ISTAT (the Italian statistics body), for every Italian woman there are 0.94 Italian men. These figures are not notably different from those in the UK or anywhere else in the Western world. Nor have they changed much in the past few decades. The only conclusion that one can come to is that the Latin lover is all mouth and no trousers. Or rather, he has trousers, but he just doesn't all that often get to take them off.

“Perhaps British women have the wrong idea,” says one Italian diplomat, whom I am forbidden to name. “There is this myth among Italian youngsters that northern European women are . . . well, that they can approach them and . . . you see? They wouldn't speak to Italian women in the way they speak to British women. Never. Not at all.”

The research from Bradley University seems to support this thesis. “Historically we have repressed women's short-term mating,” says Schmitt, “and there are all sorts of double standards out there where men's short-term mating was sort of acceptable but women's wasn't.”

In Italy, it would appear, it still isn't. Hence those very low rates of divorce, and of children born out of wedlock (both around 20 per cent, compared with well over 40 per cent in the UK).

Nations scoring highly on his table, says Schmitt, tend to do so only because the women increasingly behave like the men. So the real story here isn't the demise of the male Latin lover, it's the rise of the Accommodating British Female. And Italian men have known about them for years.

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