More detail would be appreciated. Last Tango in Paris has definitely been aired on TV in the last years. Salò probably not, but it’s not like it was impossible to get it for private viewing.
Movies such as The Exorcist have been censored for TV even recently, though. I remember someone familiar with that movie telling me that they rewatched it on TV and it was missing scenes. But that’s likely less because of this century-old law and more because of the will of certain people and organizations at the backstage of certain TV stations. Anime has a long history of edulcoration and censorship on Italian TV, at least when aired by the Mediaset channels. Meanwhile those same channels are notorious for airing the kind of trash that completely destroyed the quality of public TV in Italy in the span of 30 years.
BTW, a rudimentary rating system for movies on TV was already introduced in the early 90s. A red, yellow or green symbol would appear on screen to inform watchers about the presence of scenes not suitable to minors.
The most interesting thing here though, is that this law was made in 1913. Think about what cinema could be back then, and you can make all sorts of assumptions about the content of the many films that were lost before preservation became a concern. To be this scared of movies in the pre-WWI period means that something pretty nasty was already being put to film.
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