The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Fetish With a Capital F -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 10)

Max and Maria's relationship started romantically enough, though, with the two opposites meeting via modem way back in 1996.

'By email,' she gushes. 'Not chat; email—one email a day. Without picture! Just words. And after seventeen days, he took a plane from Milan to Palermo to see me.'

'And some months after we met, we decided to go to London's Rubber Ball,' Max adds, as if a fetish fest were the most natural destination in the world for one's true love.

But Max and Maria talk about fetish with a capital F, recalling their introduction to binding and gagging with reverence—and a winning innocence.

Predictably, Max was the first to voice an interest in Fetish, though Maria soon followed.

'I love clothes in general—but I love fetish clothes. Very, very much,' she waggles her eyebrows.

THE POWER OF FETISH

Max had been emailing some aficionados in the UK—for an erotic novel—and they invited him and his new lady-friend to find out about Fetish in the flesh.

'And we said, Oh!'

'Oh, my God!' Maria adds in mock horror.

'We didn't know anything, and we were—'

'—afraid. We thought, they'll eat us!' Maria laughs so hard she snorts.

'But we decided we have to go,' Max adds, his eyes turning dreamy. 'And it was—it was such a beautiful experience. We discovered a world of—'

'Kind persons.'

'Yes.'

'Correct persons.'

Eh? At a bash devoted to bondage and sadomasochism?

You'd expect a fetish fiesta to be called a lot of things—sexy, scandalous or just plain hot—but Max and Maria paint it as nothing less than a life-changing experience.

In fact, listening to them describe the transformative power of Fetish, you wonder what they see in it that you don't. So I ask Max why he thought it was beautiful.

'It changed our lives because inside, you may have a lot of fantasies, but you're afraid of these things, and you think you are sick. You think you are the only one in the world to think of these things,' he explains.

'When you see 3,000 people, all with joy—'

'—respect—'

'—with respect, with a lot of creativity, with fantasy, you are astonished. You say, there is something nice—there is beauty—in all of this. The people are beautiful inside before the outside.'