Bunel said he was speaking for about 50 international agencies operating in Iraq. He said he had no idea who had abducted the Italian women, Simona Torretta and Simona Pari, who work for Bridge to Baghdad, an organization helping children across the country.

However, an Iraqi militant group called Ansar al-Zawahri said it had kidnapped the women. In a message posted on an Islamist Web site, the group claimed that “this is the first of our attacks against Italy.” The name Partisans of Zawahri appears to refer to Osama bin Laden’s right-hand man, Ayman al-Zawahri. But there were doubts last night about the authenticity of the statement, which made no demands.

Virtually all major aid organizations have already left Iraq because of the deteriorating security situation, including the United Nations, the International Red Cross and Médecins sans Frontières.

Those that have stayed have had to reassess the situation because of the nature of this week’s kidnapping, which involved 20 gunmen bursting into the organization’s office on Tuesday afternoon in central Baghdad. It marked a change in strategy by hostage takers, who had not previously targeted aid workers or women, except for one Japanese woman. Most hostages have been captured on roads and in conflict zones outside the capital.

In Italy yesterday, friends and colleagues of the women expressed shock, and the prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi, called on left-wing opposition leaders to stand with the right in the face of the crisis. Berlusconi was said to be “aghast and flabbergasted” that women were being harmed because “Islam teaches that they are sacred.”

In a statement, opposition leaders repeated their opposition to the war in Iraq and Italy’s military presence there, but said the priority was to save the hostages.

The deputy prime minister, Gianfranco Fini, said the kidnapping showed that “terrorists had made a quantum leap in their strategy.” Roberto Calderoli, a cabinet minister in Berlusconi’s center-right government, described the attack as “a declaration of war against the West” because Iraqi rebels made no distinction between military and civilian foreigners in their country.

The Italian media broadcast footage of the women playing with children in Iraq and talking of their passion for their work. The newspaper Corriere della Sera said the kidnappers probably “knew perfectly well” what the women did and kidnapped them “to show they don’t distinguish” between aid workers and soldiers.

Pope John Paul joined in a prayer for their release with pilgrims at his general audience, and a Vatican newspaper headline said: “Women of peace are hostages of war.” Leaders of the Muslim community in Italy addressed the nation through Vatican radio, condemning the attack, calling for the women to be released and repeating that their capture goes against Islamic teaching.

This kidnapping comes 10 days after the murder of Italian journalist Enzo Baldoni, who was kidnapped while traveling to Najaf with the Italian Red Cross. Italy rejected the demand from his kidnappers, calling themselves the Islamic army of Iraq, that it pull its troops out of Iraq. Berlusconi’s government has been heavily criticized over his negotiations to free Baldoni.

Wednesday night a Web site published a photograph that it said showed the missing journalist’s body. The picture showed a bearded figure resembling Baldoni, bloodied or dirtied and lying on the ground. There was no immediate independent verification of the picture.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld expressed sympathy for the 1,000 U.S. dead and said he was confident the interim Iraqi government would find a way to retake cities now in the hands of insurgents.

However, in the latest of a spate of kidnappings, about 20 men with Kalashnikovs and pistols with silencers drove up to a private house belonging to the humanitarian organization Bridge to Baghdad in a busy commercial area of the Iraqi capital and rushed inside in broad daylight Tuesday.

They left with two Italian staff, Simona Pari and Simona Torretta, both 29, and two Iraqis, a woman who worked for an Italian organization, Intersos, and a male employee of Bridge to Baghdad.

A spokesman for Bridge to Baghdad, Lello Rienzi, told reporters in Rome that the men were from an unidentified Islamic group. “We had no sign of danger,” he said, adding that the women “believed they were working in complete security.”

Witnesses described the kidnapping as “extremely professional” and said a well-dressed man wearing a suit and tie had led the operation. “Four cars pulled up outside our house. About 20 guys suddenly burst inside. They made us sit on the ground and started beating us,” one eyewitness, Haider Muhammad Ali, 26, said. “They kidnapped the Italian women and an Iraqi girl. The women didn’t scream. They just went quietly with the kidnappers. We were completely terrified. We were 100 percent convinced we would all die.”

Around 15 people were inside the house at the time. The kidnappers took five hostages — but one man, an Iraqi, escaped in the confusion. None of the guards at the house had weapons, Ali said. “We are a humanitarian organization and we don’t believe in them.”

The chief of the Italian intelligence service, SISMI, Nicolo Pollari, recently warned that hostage takers might target women for extra emotional impact.

Numerous Iraqis and Westerners have been abducted by political groups, and criminal gangs demanding ransom, but there is growing concern among some that gangs seeking large amounts of ransom are now targeting non-Iraqis. Last week, Kuwait and Gulf Link Transport Co. said it paid $500,000 in ransom for seven of its employees. The latest abductions are likely to fuel uncertainty over the fate of two French journalists whose kidnappers have reportedly demanded $5 million for their release.

It was not clear last night whether the motivation behind yesterday’s kidnapping was political or financial. Italy has about 2,700 troops in Iraq, the third largest number after the U.S. and Britain, and its pro-American government has refused to cave in to militant demands that they leave.

Torretta, the head of the organization’s Iraq operation, has been in the country since before the war started. Pari arrived in Iraq in June 2003, and was working on a school project in the capital.

Berlusconi owns or controls 95% of Italian terrestrial television, but even this hasn’t guaranteed him control over the Italian electorate — despite the fact that Italians watch more television than any other country in Europe (four hours a day, on average). Many Italians, it seems, are “Berlusconied out”, suffering from a surfiet of Silvio-friendly news, images of the billionaire prime minister’s smiling face and, most of all, the mindless gameshows on his three Mediaset television channels.

For as long as Berlusconi has dominated the political stage in Italy, the long-legged television “hostesses” have never been off the small screen. Under Mediaset, the cult of the scantily clad, pouting “showgirl” — an institution for decades on Italian television — has been taken to new heights of ridiculousness. But there are signs that she, like her patron Berlusconi, may also have had her day. Television audiences have been showing signs of boredom, and the latest ratings figures show that more and more Italians are forsaking the Benny Hill formula of the older, fully dressed man surrounded by pretty girls in underwear. Instead, they are tuning in to serious current affairs programmes, documentaries and costume dramas.

Mediaset’s satirical news review, Striscia la Notizia (Strip the News), the showcase for the country’s most high-profile television hostesses, drew 12 million viewers in 2002. This year, viewing figures have at times sunk to an all-time low of five million. Research has shown that it is the point at which the women start dancing on the newsdesk that the viewers switch off.

Last month, the summer-long beauty contest to find new hostesses for next season’s Striscia ran into protests in the ancient Umbrian town of Gubbio. Marlina Scavizzi, a teacher at Perugia’s Academy of Fine Art and spokesperson for the Libera Mente (Free Mind) women’s group in Umbria, which organised the protest, says, “We felt we had to say something. Under Berlusconi, junk television has taken over, and the hostess is the most annoying thing about it. We don’t need to repeat these humiliating images of women as bodies with no brains. In the past few years, the representation of women on television has become more and more stupid.”

Italian women are looking for new, stronger role models. In recent months, many women have been inspired by the example of reporter and television anchorwoman Lilli Gruber. Gruber, who provided incisive, balanced reporting for state television from Iraq until earlier this year, has recently gone into politics. Representing the opposition left, she won more than a million votes in the recent European elections. In Rome, she ran against Berlusconi (among others) and won 237,000 votes to his 116,000.

Even so, the television showgirl will be a tough stereotype to shift from the national psyche. Books have been written about them, films have celebrated them, and Mattel Italy has a line in television-showgirl Barbies. An EU-funded “fame school”, where men and women train to appear on Striscia la Notizia-style shows, recently opened outside Naples.

Indeed, she is such an institution that she has even entered the dictionary. A velina (plural veline ) is defined in this year’s Zingarelli dictionary as “a young television assistant who exhibits herself in succinct clothes during a transmission”. Those women who don’t qualify as veline can content themselves with less glamorous roles, such as letterine (women who hold the letters up), numerine (women who hold the numbers up) or microfonine (women who hold the microphones).

The most successful veline are at the heart of Italian celebrity culture, and can earn a fortune. And while au diences appear to be turning off, there are still plenty of young women who want to be on television. “I’m the one who is using this show, to get myself noticed,” says Virginia Battista, a 23-year-old economics student at Rome University, as she waits for her two minute “sexiness test” (a short dance routine). “I don’t think there’s anything degrading about showing your body on TV. If you’ve got a good one, why not use it? Anyone else would.”

The creator of the Berlusconi-era velina, producer Antonio Ricci, claims it is all harmless fun. The summer roadshow is about personality as much as looks, he says  a hard position to maintain when contestants are sorted by hair colour (blondes one night, brunettes the next) and asked to perform a variety of “challenges” such as simulating sex or pretending to be an animal. Ricci argues that Striscia la Notizia’s two veline, one dark, one blonde, are a part of the satire and not meant to be taken seriously. So is the theme tune, Bimba Bomba (Bomb Girl), which Ricci has dedicated to Palestinian martyrs. “It reminds you that in other countries the body is used in a different way,” he told Candida Morvillo, author of a book called Velina Republic.

Ricci does not deny that his veline are superficial. But he insists that “women model themselves on these girls. They are what so many women want to be.” The audience for veline, he argues, is more female than male. In the past, 55% of Striscia la Notizia’s audience has been women, and it is often mothers who want their daughters to appear on television and fathers who are less keen.

Scavizzi would disagree. Since the protest in Umbria, she says, Libera Mente has received messages of support from individuals and organisations all over Italy. “It’s as if we’ve broken the ice. There are a lot of Italians who want something better.” That “something better” has so far been best represented by Gruber, currently one of the most intelligent and popular personalities in Italian television and politics. Gruber speaks four languages and wears a snug-looking neckscarf (no cleavage). But this did not stop Italians from crowning her the sexiest woman on television last year.

“I’m short. I don’t think I’m that sexy,” she laughs. “But women admire me for being serious without giving up on my femininity.

“Wherever you look on Italian television, you have a bimbo. Women I speak to all round the country are sick and tired of that image. It’s a representation of woman that doesn’t exist any more in Italy. In the last three years, it has got worse. We are living in a culture of the right that does not have much of an opinion of women. It is not a culture that promotes respect.”

News reports indicate that increasing numbers of young women, inspired by Gruber, are signing up to study journalism. In the newsroom of the state broadcaster Rai, the local media have already identified a handful of budding “Gruberine.”

So are Italians redefining their concept of sexy? Is the velina a dying breed? “There will always be a residual demand for showgirls on Italian television,” says Michele Sorice, professor of the history of television and radio at Rome’s Sapienza University. Italy remains a conservative culture. “But the gameshow producers will soon be forced to realise that there is a growing demand for something else.”

In campaigning for equal opportunities at work and in education, Italian women have tended to lag behind other Europeans. In Italy, only 40% of women work, compared to 55% and above in other European countries. Women not in full-time employment have been among the most committed television viewers and, three years ago, were among the most committed Berlusconi voters.

But for growing numbers of women, looking good is no longer enough. You have to be able to speak, too. You have to have politics. And what you say has to make sense.