Club of the Month: Italy’s Ugly Club

Sounds like a plastic surgeon’s dream, doesn’t it? An entire club of people whose looks could use more than the average amount of professional nipping and tucking.



Actually, the club was started by Telesforo Iacobelli, a man with a small nose. He is considered less attractive because Italians really dig a big schnozzle.

So, every year, the Ugly Club in Piobbico, Italy, holds the Festival of the Ugly and picks a new president. Want to guess who wins? You got it, ‘ol Telesforo himself. It’s because he has spent his entire adult life fighting for the recognition of the ugly in a world that prizes physical beauty.

But here’s the secret the Ugly Club does not want you to know: the club was originally started 40 years ago for the town’s single women who felt they could not find mates because they, the women, were not lovely enough.
That might have something to do with the choosing of the club’s motto: “Ugliness is a virtue, beauty is a slave.”


Actually, the only absolute, mud-fence ugly thing about the club is the clubhouse door, pictured, below.



The sign above the door reads, “Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Here Enter!”

Whoops, that’s Dante. Wrong Italian! The sign really says, “National Association of the Ugly.”