The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Fancy a Fetish B&B? -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 8)

As the home of Catholicism, modern Italy is woefully behind the curve in the pornification of Western culture.

However, I've made a date to meet a couple of contemporary Aretinos (in the non-libelous sense, of course) who are doing their best to help their country catch up.

Max and Maria edit anthologies with titles like Latex and Sextoys for the first major Italian publisher to move into erotica.

They also run a sex-news site for an internet company and privately have their own just-for-fun fetish site, advertising what must be Venice's—if not all of Southern Europe's—only 'fetish B&B.'

As it happens, it's Carnival time, and the vendors on the Rialto are flogging even more masks than usual.

I've never knowingly encountered a couple of fetishists, so I have no idea what to expect.

My imagination defaults to the quotidian kinksters you see on late-night TV: he'll be bald and goateed, she'll have dyed, forever-young hair, and they'll both be sinewy and sun-dried, with just enough tattoos and piercings on display to hint at the horrors they've inflicted on their privates.

Instead, the couple who approach me at the waterbus stop look disarmingly normal.

Max had mentioned that he's tall, but Maria is short, and what's most noticeable about them are their differences.

They're both attractive for their age, but he's a reserved northerner from Milan—with a discreet silver hoop in one ear—and she's a vivacious mamma-mia from Sicily.

He has flecks of grey in his hair and gentle eyes; hers sparkle beneath a mischievous streak of white.

After an introductory drink in a bar, they guide me through a confusion of streets to their apartment in a fourteenth-century palazzo just down the canal from St. Mark's Basilica.

The ceilings must be at least sixteen feet high, and the tall, marble-framed wooden doors that connect the various rooms date from the eighteenth century.

Against this timeless backdrop, the rooms have been kitted out in modern Ironic Eclectic—hence the big, white, plastic armchair in the sitting room—while the decorations next door are even more eye-catching: Max's studio doubles as the guest room for the 'fetish B&B,' so the walls have been hung with his paintings of bound and gagged pornistas in saintly poses—complete with golden halos.