The Sinner's Grand Tour
Page 1
PRAISE FOR TONY PERROTTET
Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists
“A terrifically funny writer … this history-cum-travelogue is as enjoyable as it is informative and twice as quirky.”
—Boston Globe
“An appealing mix of the zany and the arcane … [Perrottet’s] insistence on seeing what the ancients saw, no matter the filth, decay, and craven commercialism obscuring most ancient sites, becomes a terrific running gag.”
—New York Times Book Review
“Brilliantly researched and beautifully written.”
—Rocky Mountain News
The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games
“It’s so great to have a truly funny (and poetic) writer putting the lurid colors back on the pale marble, where they belong.… It’s full of the get-a-load-of-this factor—those juicy, vivid stories you can’t wait to tell your friends. To my mind, that quality is the distinguishing trait of great nonfiction.”
—Teller of Penn and Teller,
Las Vegas entertainer (and onetime Latin teacher)
“Combining a wealth of vivid details with a knack for narrative pacing and subtle humor … an entertaining, edifying account that puts a human face on one of humanity’s most remarkable spectacles.”
—Publishers Weekly
“This lively account of the classical Olympics portrays them as ‘the Woodstock of antiquity,’ and claims that the Games, while taken seriously, were also where Greeks gathered for a five-day debauch.”
—The New Yorker
Napoleon’s Privates: 2,500 Years of History Unzipped
“A sinfully entertaining survey of perversion.”
—Salon
“It’s refreshing to find such an entertaining writer whose history is also meticulously researched. Perrottet’s take on the past is erudite, original, and witty—even, frequently, hilarious.”
—Paul Cartledge, professor of classics, Cambridge University
“If Woody Allen had become a historian, he might have come up with Napoleon’s Privates. Learned, ribald, and very funny.”
—Chris Ryan, New York Times bestselling author of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality
ALSO BY TONY PERROTTET
Off the Deep End:
Travels in Forgotten Frontiers
Pagan Holiday:
On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists
(originally published as Route 66 A.D.)
The Naked Olympics:
The True Story of the Ancient Games
Napoleon’s Privates:
2,500 Years of History Unzipped
Copyright © 2011 by Tony Perrottet
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Broadway Paperbacks, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com
BROADWAY PAPERBACKS and its logo,
a letter B bisected on the diagonal,
are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
All photos, unless otherwise credited, are from the author’s collection.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Perrottet, Tony.
The sinner’s grand tour : a journey through the historical underbelly of Europe / Tony Perrottet.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Sex and history—Europe, Western—Anecdotes. 2. Grand tours (Education)—Anecdotes. 3. Perrottet, Tony—Travel—Europe, Western—Anecdotes. I. Title.
HQ18.E8.P47 2011
914.04—dc22 2011001256
eISBN: 978-0-307-59219-4
Cover design by Dan Rembert/Jim Massey
Cover photograph of The Three Graces by
Antonio Canova/© Araldo de Luca/CORBIS
v3.1
For Lesley and the boys
CONTENTS
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
The Devil’s Travel Bureau
Chapter One Hellfire Holidays: The Great British Sex Club Tour
Chapter Two Paris to the Gutter: “Erotic Archaeology” of the Belle Époque
Chapter Three Infernal Provence: The Marquis de Sade Is Dead! Long Live Pierre Cardin!
Chapter Four Seven-Hundred-Year Itch: The Love Lives of Medieval Peasants
Chapter Five Wild and Crazy Swiss: Sex and Drugs and Lyric Poetry
Chapter Six “Little Death” in Venice: The Covert Casanova Tour
Chapter Seven Vatican Vice: The Pope’s Pornographic Bathroom
Chapter Eight Return of the Pagans: The Once and Future Paradise of Capri
Notes
Acknowledgments
About the Author
The desire to possess that which is forbidden is as strong in the man as the child, in the wise as the foolish.
—Henry Spencer Ashbee,
The Index of Prohibited Books (1877)
THE DEVIL’S TRAVEL BUREAU
It was a classic summer’s day in London—the city was enveloped by veils of dismal rain—and as I skulked through the lonely back streets of Bloomsbury, I began to feel like Dr. Jekyll before a binge. Decent folk who passed me by seemed to hasten their step, ducking beneath their umbrellas when they glimpsed my wild eyes.
It was as if they could sense my furtive mission. I was on my way to the British Museum, where I planned to locate the dreaded Secretum, the world’s most extensive cache of historical erotica, and then wallow in its shameful contents.
In the high Victorian age, with Oscar Wilde in the defendant box, fig leafs on every statue and moral watchdogs on every corner, many a guilty-looking gentleman would have trodden this same path to London’s most hallowed institution. But instead of admiring the respectable exhibits, these discerning types would have slipped through the crowds to meet a museum official, the Keeper of the Secretum. Letters of introduction were presented, written by trustees or college dons, and then the visitor (who might have been accompanied, on rare occasions, by a female companion or two) would be ushered down a dark stairway to the North Basement, to wait for a door to be unlocked.
As the blue flames of the gas lamps spluttered to life, shelves full of writhing limbs emerged from the darkness—naked lovers carved in marble, satyrs in gold leaf on parchment, bronze phalluses of astonishing proportions. For the delectation of the chosen few, the Secretum offered an array of historical artifacts that were considered too obscene for public display. Cultures that the Victorians could barely dream of were here, brazenly enjoying themselves in every possible manner.
It must have seemed like a shrine to forbidden pleasure.
The Secretum was created in 1866, at the height of the era’s sexual hysteria, to protect the public from the moral perils of history. The year before, 434 ancient phallic objects had been donated by a freethinking doctor named George Witt, who had made his fortune in Australia from banking. Dr. Witt was convinced that all world religions had begun with phallus worship, and had gathered around him a clique of wealthy phallus collectors who supported his thesis. While accepting the bequest, the British Museum trustees voted to allocate a special room where the Witt Collection could be examined in suitable privacy. The room was quickly supplemented with “obscene” treasures from all historical periods. British archaeologists and academics had long been returning from their journeys around the world with shocking depictions of guilt-free sex. By the 1890s, the Museum Secretum, Secret Museum, boasted over 1,100 wicked objects.
Today, we can get a detailed idea of the chamber’s contents from the Secretum Acquisitions Register, a leather-bound tome wh
ere each new arrival was carefully noted. Preserved in the museum archives, the Register makes entertaining reading. The word ithyphallic (“erect penis”) appears in every second listing, with the pages often enlivened by thumbnail sketches. But it is the breadth of the collection that is most arresting. The Secretum held an eye-popping variety of Greco-Roman art, including a graphic sculpture of the god Pan fornicating with a she-goat; a medieval chastity belt; lewd engravings from Renaissance Venice; eighteenth-century porn from the oeuvre of the Marquis de Sade; ribald documents from Georgian British sex clubs; and much more. In short, the cream of Europe’s erotica had been gathered in one thrillingly dingy chamber.
The Egyptian Room, official façade of the British Museum when the Secretum was offering forbidden treats to select visitors, shown around 1890. (© Lesley Thelander)
Naturally, the Secretum earned an underground, if highbrow, cachet. But despite its fame amongst the cognoscenti, it was so risqué that very few scholars felt comfortable describing their emotions in print; the records that survive are reserved, stiff-upper-lip complaints about the poor lighting or stale air. Still, we can imagine the enthusiasm of enlightened visitors to be similar to that of Henry James, who examined a portfolio of Lord Byron’s graphic letters and sketches with his friend the novelist John Buchan. Buchan recalled in his memoir, “The thing nearly made me sick, but my colleague (James) never turned a hair. His only words for some special vileness were ‘singular’—‘most curious’—‘nauseating perhaps, but how quite inexpressibly significant.’ ”
In 1912, the Secretum collection was divided up and moved to a series of locked backroom cupboards. Although new pieces, including two-hundred-year-old condoms, were still being added as late as 1953, the official attitude changed during the permissive 1960s. Items were slowly redistributed to their rightful places in the museum, and even the name Secretum fell from use. In 2001, the curator David Gaimster identified the last resting place of its vestiges as Cupboard 55 in the Department of Europe and Prehistory, and published an article with several photographs showing a few last saucy treats, which he regarded as a “time capsule” of misguided Victorian attitudes to censorship.
Today, although the museum doesn’t overadvertise the fact, the entire storage collection is available to the public for “object identification” by appointment on Tuesday afternoons. So when I was in London, I made an appointment to visit Cupboard 55.
Finally, the museum was looming above me, like a haunted temple in the rain. I jostled past noisy tour groups and entered the polished halls of the King’s Library. With a set of e-mailed instructions in my top pocket, my imagination was now racing like a schoolboy’s. Perhaps just pulling a certain book from the shelf would open a secret panel, revealing a mahogany-lined parlor managed by tuxedoed servants. The reality of my visit was a little less Merchant Ivory. In the appointed room, I muttered my name into an intercom, and a door clicked open to reveal a shabby, abandoned hallway coated in hospital-gray paint. A pallid secretary appeared and led me up some echoing stairs to the storage areas. The walls were cracked and chipped, the windows opaque with grime.
Copy of Renaissance Venetian pornography from I Modi, or The Positions, safely locked up in the Secretum during the Victorian age. (© Trustees of the British Museum)
I was getting excited.
Waiting for me was a curator, Liz Gatti, a fashionable sylph with an understated nose piercing. She was an incongruous figure, like an emissary from Marc Jacobs somehow lost in Bleak House.
“We get a lot of inquiries about the Secretum,” she began, as I signed the visitor’s book. “But I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. There’s hardly anything left.”
“Oh, I’ll have a peek anyway,” I said with what I hoped was proper aplomb.
We followed a corridor that was now lined with antique wooden cabinetry, each marked with a bronze number plaque, until we stopped in front of Cupboard 55. This was it, the dreaded Secretum’s last known resting place.
“No whiff of brimstone,” I joked.
Ms. Gatti looked at me askance, then pulled out a wad of keys.
I held my breath as she creaked open the aged hinges, as if it were a vampire’s casket. Squinting in the semi-darkness, I made out rows of peculiar items that looked a bit like dreidels.
“Egad,” I muttered, mystified. They were dreidels.
“Everything really has been moved about,” Liz sighed. “Today we use the cupboard to house Judaica.”
This was deflating and bewildering news: the last items from Cupboard 55 had been redistributed in 2005.
“But is there nothing here from the former Secretum?” I pleaded.
“Well, actually …” she said hesitantly, fingering the keys. “A few bits and bobs.”
That was when she cracked open the adjoining door—Cupboard 54.
And there, neatly cushioned in a silk-lined wooden box, was a selection of candy-colored wax phalluses from eighteenth-century Italy. Liz explained that they had been donated by the avid phallus hunter Sir William Hamilton, British envoy to Naples during the Napoleonic Wars, who found them being used as fertility offerings in a village church and liberated them for Britain. (His busy career as a collector in Italy was overshadowed by the scandalous fact that his wife, Lady Hamilton, ran off with Lord Nelson). On the shelf below, a clinically white, acid-free Styrofoam sheet held items from the Witt Collection: Rows of ancient Roman phallic jewelry, crafted from coral, amber, and glass and now laid out like colorful insects in an entomology case. Amulets depicted lovers indulging in a range of athletic coital positions. One strange statuette showed a winged dwarf with a monstrous organ. Of course, phallic objects were carried every day as good luck charms in ancient Rome and are no longer off-limits. But today, filed away in this cobwebbed corner, they felt like the last buried link to that Victorian hysteria.
My eyes ran over the wealth of oddities—badges worn by medieval pilgrims, depicting the female genitals; a tobacco-pipe-stopper from the Tudor age, showing a knickerless woman pulling up her skirt—before settling on the last display. Lovingly laid out on a felt base were four eighteenth-century condoms, which had been discovered in the pages of a 1783 British self-help book, The Guide to Health, Beauty, Riches and Honour. These pioneer contraceptives were handcrafted from animal intestines. They were like works of art, intentionally pretty, tied at the open end by little pink ribbons of silk. They had survived in mint condition, all the way from the era of Casanova.
I was in historian’s heaven.
Items from the former Secretum: Left, wax phalluses from southern Italy. Right, 18th century condom made from animal membrane. (Both © Trustees of the British Museum)
REPROBATES ABROAD
With its breakthroughs in rail and sea transportation, the Victorian age also marked the birth of modern travel, and it would have been a stolid visitor indeed for whom the Secretum did not inspire wanderlust. If such peculiar wonders lurked here in London, how much more could be found in the outside world?
Those last remnants of the cache had the same inspiring effect on me. The British Museum was only the first stop in a personal Grand Tour I’d planned across Europe, in search of forbidden historical fruit. Today, the entire continent is still littered with secret boudoirs, perverse relics, and ancient dungeons, many of which, I was convinced, could be found.
In a way, this was a trip I’d been plotting since I was a teenager. I attended one of the last hard-line Irish Catholic high schools in Sydney, where the records of history were hardly less sanitized than they were for Victorians. In this orthodox world view, the ancient Greeks were lofty philosophers, Renaissance popes were cultured patrons of the arts, Georgian aristocrats were demure scientists and scholars, and all those Edwardian writers who moved to Capri were just interested in the scenery.
Even as an adolescent, I suspected there was more to it than that. And in recent years, the academic world has been deluged with research that focuses on the human, daily details of histor
y, overturning the sterile view of the past. Whole volumes are now penned on the gay clubs of belle époque Paris or Weimar Berlin. The Marquis de Sade is more famous than any Catholic saint, and a lesbian nun in Renaissance Venice has as many biographies as Britney Spears.
Now, as I rushed through the dark streets of London, my mind was filled with images of history’s most riotous fleshpots. I was going to hunt down the physical evidence of all those subversive texts. What if I found the truth behind Europe’s most fabled lost wonders—the elaborate love-making “thrones” used in nineteenth-century French brothels, for example, or the pornographic chambers in the Vatican?
I arrived back at my hotel—it was called the Goodenough Club, which sounded like the sort of place Ebenezer Scrooge might put up his mother-in-law—but stopped short outside my room, frozen by the sound of bloodcurdling screams from within. It had almost slipped my mind that I wasn’t taking this journey of discovery alone.
The moment I turned the handle, reality came crashing back. The floor was ankle-deep with clothes, toys, colored markers, plastic bottles and half-eaten food. It looked as though a horde of Pictish barbarians had ransacked the place. It was hard to believe the damage had been done by just two kids, aged ten and four. Now Henry and Sam were jumping off the beds like ecstatic ninjas. My wife, Lesley, looked shell-shocked. Any attempt to calm the boys had only inflamed their jet-lagged frenzy.
Les told me the management had been calling with complaints. Apparently the people downstairs thought a second blitz had begun. It was no use explaining that these kids were fresh off the plane from New York, a cross between Botticelli cherubs and Spielbergian children of the corn.
Instead, I explained to Lesley how I’d just examined a goat-intestine prophylactic. She nodded distractedly. “Do they deliver pizza in London?”