The History of Sex: Graz and Vienna -- Pleasure-Seeking Pagans -- (Chapter VIII, Part 8)

Venus in Furs is a remarkably modern tale about a Galician nobleman who falls in love with a rich, young Russian and turns her into a sadist.

Severin and Wanda von Dunajew initially bond over their belief that the Christian world is corrupt; it's more honest to live as pleasure-seeking pagans.

Unlike many modern hedonists, though, they're realistic about 'the world of the ancients:'

'Pleasure and cruelty, liberty and slavery went hand in hand. People who want to live like the gods of Olympus must of necessity have slaves whom they can toss into their fish ponds, and gladiators who do battle while they banquet, and they must not mind if by chance a bit of blood bespatters them.' 

As in his real-life fling with Fanny, Sacher-Masoch's alter ego in Venus in Furs adopts the common servant's name of Gregor and follows his Mistress to Italy, where she seduces a Greek.

Besides their contract, Wanda goes the extra mile by having Severin write a suicide note in case she opts to kill him.

Sure enough, the crueler she treats him, the more he worships her, especially when she's wearing fur.

'Furs have a stimulating effect on all highly organized natures,' Severin explains. 'Science has recently shown a certain relationship between electricity and warmth… This is why cats exercise such a magic influence...'

'A woman wearing furs, then, is nothing else than a large cat, an augmented electric battery?' 

'Certainly.'

You'll have guessed that the ending isn't warm and fuzzy: Severin is 'cured' by being whipped within an inch of his life; he then turns into a sadist himself.

Years later, the Galician tells a friend what he's learned: in love, a man 'has only one choice: to be the tyrant over or the slave of woman.'

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Muslim Porn and Darwinian Capitalism -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 27)

Apart from my word to the wise, though, Milukman says his tip-offs have come from Arabic subscribers—not outsiders.

'But surely if you care about Allah and the Dome of the Rock, you're not going to be surfing Muslim porn in the first place?' I suggest.

'All that is about hypocrisy.'

As for himself, Milukman's mother is from Naples and his father French; 'Milukman' is a meaningless nickname, and his heritage has made him a fully indifferent Catholic.

'In my mind, I'm Italian; in my way of being, I'm French,' he says. 'I'm a Christian, but that is not a problem.' 

If anything, like so many people I've met on my journey, Milukman comes across as a Darwinian capitalist, a man whose belief system consists of one brutally simple credo: 'survival of the richest,' with little if any concern for what was once quaintly called the common good.

Superficially, he's as charming as you'd expect a Franco-Italian to be and far more handsome than the stereotypical Nethead.

Fundamentally, though, he must be a pretty nasty piece of work.

Milukman made his first fortune by starting a vengeance website back in 1998, claiming that it was one of the few Internet concepts to originate in Europe and be copied in the US rather than the other way round.

On the site, jilted lovers get their own back by posting compromising photos of their exes, alongside explanations of why they want revenge.

'For me, it was a very funny idea,' he recalls. 'I never believed it would be as successful as it was.'

Now in his mid-thirties, Milukman says he's made enough money from porn to never have to work again.

I have no way of verifying this, but when he mentions that an ongoing tax inspection may cost him €150,000, he doesn't look worried at all.

'My father had a big business,' he says, adding that he didn't know anything about France's slums until he started Beurettes Rebelles.

His dad wanted him to join the family business, but Milukman rebelled. That's how he got into porn.

'It's the best business to make money in,' he shrugs.

The History of Sex: Paris and Provence -- Pierre Cardin: The New Master of the Marquis' Domain -- (Chap. VII, Pt. 3)

Ensconced in their Saturday-night best, the members of the mostly middle-aged audience watch it all stern-faced and stoically, taking their high culture like other people take medicine, convinced it must be good for them because it's been sanctioned from on high—in this case, literally: rumor has it that the new master of the Marquis' domain helicopters in from the capital.

Now well into his eighties, Cardin seems to have reached the stage in life where he doesn't care about keeping up appearances.

Naturally, he still sports his black glasses and navy-blue blazers, and his sneakers are Umbro this year rather than Nike, but what's left of his hair has been clipped short—not long and wavy—and he hasn't bothered shaving.

In other words, the fashion billionaire looks like an old man who's lived long enough to be at ease with himself, pushing a large belly in front of him like a wheelbarrow.

When I met him, Pierre Cardin looked more like this

than this:

In fact, Lena and I bumped into him yesterday without recognizing him, and I spoke with him earlier this evening at a soiree hosted by SCAD, the American art college.

On a garden terrace overlooking the Luberon valley, he admitted he'd never imagined owning the Marquis de Sade's castle—or Casanova's old haunt in Venice, for that matter.

'It's very funny that I live in Casanova's villa and the Marquis de Sade's,' he mused. 'I'm Italian, you know—'

—actually, I didn't—

'I'm Venetian, and I know Florence, and for me this area of France has the same atmosphere as Florence.'

After restoring the chateau's main tower, the new lord of Lacoste turned the adjoining quarry into a magnificent amphitheatre to host his month-long Festival de Lacoste.

'Last year I said to Pietra: "Why don't you imagine what happened to the Marquis de Sade when he was in the hospital with crazy people?"' he recalled, adding that he was more than happy with the result.

'It's extraordinary. Very fantastic—you'll enjoy it.'

Well, call me a philistine, but after the initial buzz of being in situ wears off, the only coherent theme I can discern from the overly long show is that crazy people are—wait for it—crazy. (If surprisingly sexy.)

By the end, the comely ensemble of three men and four women have stripped off to dance semi if not fully naked.

Who knew lunatics could be so hot?

The History of Sex: Seville -- Rape as a Weapon -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 10)

That claim that would have appalled the late 'Generalissimo of Spain' and self-styled 'Leader of the Last Crusade and of the Hispanic World.'

Not that he was a big fan of Don Juans.

Francisco Franco's father had been a womanizing military man who was often away from home (has anybody seen my daddy?), leaving the future Fascist to cling to his devout, bourgeois Catholic mother.

Like most dictators, Franco wound up running his beloved Motherland into the ground. But it wasn't meant to turn out that way.

In launching his coup against Spain's anti-Catholic government in 1936, Franco's goal had been to restore España to its glory days as a global power, adopting the 'Catholic Monarchs' who founded the Inquisition as his role models.

The Last Crusade: Fascist propaganda from the Civil War
Franco vowed to make Spain the 'Spiritual Guide of the World'

The Fascists aimed to bring about not just a political and economic revolution, but also a moral one, rejecting liberalism—particularly the relativism of Rousseau—and restoring the Church to the center of Spanish life.

Decadent Italy and the Vatican might be the Pope's home, but Franco's Spain aimed to implement the purest form of Catholicism on the planet.

And right from the beginning, sex was a weapon.

Seville was one of the first cities to fall to Franco's coupmongers, and the officer who conquered it bragged about the rapes committed by his troops.

For men who viewed women as either virgins or whores, of course, violating a godless Communist wasn't really rape at all: she was already a whore.

After the war, these false ideals became the focus of the Fascist regime.

'In the Spain of National-Catholicism, the accent on immorality fell almost exclusively on sexual sin, so much so that the multiple forms of theft and corruption were forgotten,' according to a fascinating history of Sexual Repression in Franco's Spain, which argues that 'the autarchy's sexual repression also had its Torquemada:' the Minister of Information and Tourism, a 'super-Catholic' who supposedly kept fiscal accounts of how many souls the Fascist regime saved each year.

Spanish Civil War poster:
'Avoid venereal diseases: They're as dangerous as enemy bullets'

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Protesting Too Much?: From the 'Protestant Rome' to 'Le Petit Paris' -- (Chap. V, Pt. 1)

Chapter Five

PROTESTING TOO MUCH?

From the 'Protestant Rome' to 'Le Petit Paris' in Geneva 

'Twice a week is the woman's due.
Makes in a year twice fifty-two.' 

--ex-monk Martin Luther, the 'Father of the Reformation,' advising husbands on how to keep their wives happy, c1530 

At the same time that Renaissance men were turning Venice into the world's porn capital, a greater threat to Rome was gathering force on the far side of the Alps.

Whether it was Martin Luther getting hitched to a nun or Henry VIII getting rid of his wives, sex played a crucial role in the world-changing split between Catholics and Protestants.

Though mainly a spiritual movement, this other cultural 'Re-Birth' also focused on matters of the flesh: particularly the age-old debate about celibacy.

By establishing a rival 'City of God' on earth, the Reformation ended up revolutionizing sexual mores around the world, paving the way for gender equality and creating laws on marriage, divorce and sex crimes that survive to this day.

In 1510, a provincial German monk hiked 850 miles across the Alps during winter to make a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rome.

Martin Luther soon returned disillusioned, not least because of the sexual hypocrisy he'd seen in the home of his Mother Church.

St. Peter's was on the verge of being rebuilt in the glorious incarnation we know today, financed partly by the proceeds from prostitution.

Sixtus IV, the man who commissioned the Sistine Chapel (hence its name), had also been the first Pope to tax prostitutes (and sanction the Spanish Inquisition).

And when that still wasn't enough, the Vatican stepped up its sale of indulgences, effectively doubling its money on whoremongers.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- The Clit Writ Large -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 23)

Believe it or not, it wasn't until the nineteenth century that physicians finally managed to distinguish gonorrhea from syphilis, and neither disease was definitively cured until the discovery of antibiotics.

As for telegony, homunculi, and other misconceptions, scientists weren't able to prove that sperm-and-egg fusion caused fertilization until the late 1800s—and even then just in starfish.

It's only in the last half century or so that we've actually been able to witness the moment of human conception.

As for the clitoris, well, if this sounds familiar to women, I apologize: every time we men think we've found it, we end up losing it again.

The clit has been popping in and out of male consciousness ever since its rediscovery during the Renaissance.

Columbus' lyrical moniker was apparently too much of a mouthful, so an anatomist in nineteenth century Vienna circulated something catchier, based on a Greek word—kleitoriazein—meaning 'to titillate.'

FREUD VS. FEMINISM

Ironically, the man who did the most to bury the clitoris after that was another Viennese doctor who set himself up as an authority on sex.

Freud dismissed clitoral orgasms as immature and bordering on the perverse.

It wasn't until the feminist backlash of the 1960s that women began to reclaim their bits, so to speak, and now there's no getting away from them.

Amid a slew of neologisms ('clitmaster,' 'cliterature,' etcetera), the clit's writ large in modern culture, arguably bigger than ever before.

In fact, it's hard to imagine it ever being 'lost' again.

Then again, if history is anything to go by…

* * *

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- The World's First Sex Plague (Chap. IV, Pt. 21)

Far more importantly, La Specola's collection taught generations of doctors how to save lives.

And it's awe-inspiring that such fragile artworks—made of wax!—have survived for more than 200 years.

One mannequin—known as 'The Doll'—can be taken apart layer by layer to reveal the embryo in utero.

In fact, the sequence showing the development of the embryo is one of the few mistakes in the whole collection: it was based on an ancient theory of baby-making—the idea that sperm contained an itty-bitty perfectly formed human being called a homunculus (or 'little man') that just needed incubation to grow into a baby.

But my main destination is the museum's last room.

Lest you think me a total goremonger, let me explain: one of the ironies of the Renaissance is that the rediscovery of the human body coincided with its ruination, courtesy of the world's first sex plague.

To me, syphilis is all the stranger because my ignorance of it is surpassed only by the devastation it caused.

The first 'venereal disease'—the morbus venereus, or 'sickness of Venus'—seems to have been similar to AIDS but arguably worse because it affected far more people at a time when medicine was still locked in the Middle Ages.

Doctors have been debating how syphilis got started pretty much since its discovery.

No one knows whether the vicious spirochetes were already lurking in the New World or Columbus and his crew introduced them during their raping and pillaging.

As the disease mutated into a decimator of men, though, people tended to name it after their enemies with amusing consistency.

As an early sexologist put it, civilization spread 'syphilization.'

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- A Serial Killer's Delight -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 20)

Fortunately, La Specola turns out to be fascinating (though it would have to be dire before I'd concede defeat).

The museum got its start around 1770, when a professor commissioned the wax models to train obstetricians before they went digging around in women's privates with forceps.

Over the next century or so, its workshop produced precise, three-dimensional copies of bodies to make up for the dearth of cadavers and the difficulties of storing them.

THE HUNGRY CADAVER COLLECTOR

The Florentine modelers were artists as much as anatomists, working alongside dissectors to capture every vein, artery and muscular striation in translucent colors (pity their cadaver collector, who had to trawl the hospitals with a wicker basket, complaining that he often didn't have time to eat—presumably restaurateurs didn't rush to serve him).

By the end of the eighteenth century, their work had helped convince Enlightenment thinkers that men and women were different in every way, popularizing the idea of the 'opposite sex' that's culminated in the now-popular view of sexuality as the end all and be all of a person's identity.

From the ancient view of women being 'men turned outside in,' the pendulum of misperception began to swing the other way.

Whether it's the low fluorescent lighting, the glass-and-wood display cases, or the wax effigies themselves, everything about La Specola has an antiquated, yellowish tint.

The rooms contain case after case of flayed and disemboweled male and female bodies, as well as countless limbs and organs in various stages of dissection.

Many of the reclining waxworks have faces, with the men wearing powdered wigs and the women waist-length hair.

Obviously, I'm out a century or two, but their flowing locks and classical features remind me of the Venus of Urbino—or maybe Botticelli's Birth of Venus—

—only with their guts hanging out.

If this sounds gruesome, well, it is: La Specola would probably be a serial-killer's delight.

In a last stab at credibility, though, I should point out that La Specola supposedly inspired the skin-peeling effects in Paul Verhoeven's invisible-man movie, Hollow Man, and Jean-Paul Gaultier once hosted a fashion show here, inspiring a fashionista to deem the museum 'the most contemporary place I've been in for some time':

'The flayed wax figures really speak to our contemporary consciousness, our obsession looking into the body—whether we're talking about Damien Hirst or AIDS.'

Or talking out our collective, contemporary backside.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- 'Good Luck With the Syphilis!' -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 19)

The current best guess by academics is that the Duke of Urbino had his mother buy the painting to help stoke the passions of his fourteen-year-old bride.

And what makes Urbino's Venus truly erotic is her 'attitude' in the modern sense of the term.

Titian's Venetian mentor had also dared to depict Venus with her hand betwixt her legs.

But in that earlier work, the naked goddess appeared to be sleeping.

Giorgione's Venus

When Titian copied the pose, he painted his Venus with her eyes wide open, giving the viewer 'bedroom eyes.'

In Twain's own time, the painter Manet had shocked tout le monde by borrowing Titian's Venus and recasting her as Olympia: a courtesan lying naked in heels, staring dead-eyed at the spectator with her hand clamped firmly over her moneymaker.

Manet's Olympia

And from the Renaissance love goddess to the high-class French hooker, it's just a short slide down the culture curve to the lowbrow porn of today, when women masturbating into the camera are never more than a few clicks away.

Rather than buying a masterpiece, today's urban Urbinos can gift their partners a DVD starring a woman called Venus in She Squirts #4!

But what I've really come to see are the consequences of all this venereal veneration.

If Venice is Italy's tourist stop for the Age of Decadence, then Florence represents the 'respectable' Renaissance, with more art than space to display it.

In a café, Lena and I meet a nice American couple who've come over to visit their daughter during her semester abroad.

The three of them are dutifully huddled over their guidebooks, planning how to beat the queues at all the must-see museums, when they ask us where we're headed.

'He wants to see some sculptures of syphilis,' Lena tells them.

Cue three quizzical looks—four, if you count my treacherous companion.

I try to explain, but not very convincingly, since I don't know what to expect myself. Every time I've mentioned it to a Florentine or a foreigner, I get the same reaction: you want to go where?

From what I've read, La Specola—part of the Natural History Museum—houses the world's biggest collection of anatomical wax models, including teaching specimens for nasty Olde Worlde diseases like syphilis.

When Napoleon visited, he was so impressed he ordered a complete set of duplicates for doctors in Paris to save them the trouble of experimenting on criminals.

'Soooo—the syphilis! Good luck with that!' the mother says brightly, before shooting Lena a sympathetic look.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Casanova and the Curse of the Lobster Girl -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 17)

For the record, our fellow tourists on the table aren't Americans; they're a nice British couple and a quartet of nouveau-louche Russians.

Though from where they're sitting, of course, the Curse of the Lobster Girl has come true.

There are plenty of Americans in here besides me—most of them in the silver and gold anniversary brackets—so many, in fact, that the lingua franca of the evening is English.

Our emcees: the two Casanovas

Our tablemates from England, 'Graham' and 'Barbara,' are wearing bog-standard masks and cloaks, having hired them for €80 apiece. 'They're the cheapest I could find,' he admits.

Given that Graham does business in the Middle East, and that this Carnival jaunt is his twenty-fifth anniversary gift to his wife, this strikes me as a typical case of Yorkshireman's Thrift—or possibly an explanation for why he's wealthy and I'm not.

But Graham has another romantic treat in store: he's flying their three children in later this evening to surprise Barbara at the party.

From old-fashioned romance, then, our table runs the gamut to new-money decadence: two dour, middle-aged Russians and their vaguely exotic—or exotically vague—companions.

To be fair, the Barbie Doll Cossacks do their best to make up for their partners' totalitarian lack of charm; they're as pleasant as the men are peasant.

All four of them are dressed in the best eighteenth-century finery that money laundering can buy, with Gibraltar-sized rocks to match.

But the men have the joyless demeanor of people who can eat but can't taste.

And it's not entirely clear how solid their relationships are: the youngest woman keeps glaring at her date as he boasts to Lena that he used to earn just $4 an hour as a Soviet engineer; now he makes much more as a biznesman.

BUT DOES HE PLAY BASEBALL?

'I've been to South Africa hunting,' he mentions.

'What did you shoot?' Lena asks, hoping he'll say something that's regularly culled, like springbok—or even elephants and lions.

'Buffalo.'

Strike one.

'My friend shot a cat.'

'What type?'

'A special kind of cat.'

Strike two.

'London is my favorite city,' he says. 'It's clean, and the people are friendly.'

—mind you, the man lives in Moscow— 

 'But there's better nightlife in Moscow. That's because in London people still have some belief in God and morality. In Russia, there is no morality.'

'And what type of work do you do?' Lena asks, giving him one last chance.

'Nightclubs.'

'Really? What kind?'

'The kind that only men visit.'

'Ohhhh.'

Annnnd he's outta there.

Unconscionably, at least for someone with a sweet tooth like mine, the biznesmen drag their dates off early—before they can even have dessert.

Afterwards, as Lena and I make our way across the Grand Canal to our hotel, we're stopped on the Accademia bridge by a couple in their twenties: 'Scusi—una foto?'

So we pose with the plainclothed Italians in a role reversal worthy of Carnival—though I can't help thinking there's something wrong with this picture.

* * *

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Hoop Skirt Havoc -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 16)

In trying to navigate the intricacies of Carnival—which ball to go to? where to rent costumes? how to get to and from a waterbound event?—I'd begun to suspect that the festival was an opportunity for the modern merchants of Venice to practice a custom perfected by their forefathers: gouging foreigners to bankroll their extravagance.

In the run-up to Ash Wednesday, much of the action centers on the same two palazzos that are presumably rented out on a rota each night.

Period costumes are mandatory, and each party is linked to a local costume shop, if not actually thrown by the atelier itself, allowing organizers to rake in cash for the overall event while pretending to offer generous discounts on its components.

VENICE: THE GRAND COURTESAN

Before coming here, I thought it would be a neat wheeze to track down a modern courtesan to find out how tricks have changed over the years.

Gradually, though, I've come to think that the city itself is a courtesan, selling its charms to the highest bidder.

This would be understandable if some of the money were reinvested in her upkeep.

As it is, crumbling, waterlogged Venice is decadent mainly in the root sense of the word: 'to decay.'

My cracking point came when I realized that one of the main Carnival sites is sponsored by McDonald's, with its logo stamped on every single page.

'I'm lovin' it,' my eye.

With a dozen or more masquerades to choose from, I've opted for a ball with a Casanova theme to boot.

The body of the salmon-colored Palazzo Pisani Moretta on the Grand Canal dates from the Renaissance, but its spirit is from the splendiferous eighteenth century, complete with Baroque frescoes.

Lena looks resplendent in her scarlet hoop skirt, powdered wig and mask.

And I, well, I'm her six-foot-four red-and-gold accessory in a tricorn and tights.

When I'm not struggling with my mask, I'm trying to keep my breeches on (no wonder Casanova had a hard time).

The hoop skirts are causing havoc for some of the ladies, too: Lena saw a woman fall over trying to go to the toilet.

Not a pretty sight.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Gays, Slave Nuns and 'The Bridge of Tits' -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 15)

Later Englishmen also protested that the 'whole (of Venice) may well be termed the brothel house of Europe.'

And with publicity like that, Venice soon became a must-see on the Grand Tour, that Continental odyssey intended to turn young aristos into men of culture.

In what seems unimaginable now, philosophers like Adam Smith, John Locke and Thomas Hobbes served as tutors on the Grand Tour to try to impart some knowledge to Britain's heirs, while keeping their whoring to a minimum: a bad case of 'the Venetian disease'—syphilis—could kill off a dynasty.

Two-thirds of Venetian dandies were unmarried, and the city fathers supposedly tried to woo young men back to heterosexuality by allowing prostitutes to bare their breasts on Il Ponte delle Tete—The Bridge of Tits.

Meanwhile, the daughters of aristocratic families were banged up in convents where they were more promiscuous than pious: the well-to-do had their own 'slave nuns' to do their praying and penance for them.

So I suppose it's understandable that most modern Carnival balls focus on the city's decline rather than its ascendancy.

But I can't help but think that the real reason has to do with their target market.

The powdered wigs and taffeta gowns of the Age of Decadence tend to appeal to women far more than the prim caps and high collars of the 1500s.

If we men were the decisionmakers, I reckon most of us would have plumped for the Age of the Codpiece.

When I've mentioned to locals that we're going to a ball, the reaction has been a mix of curiosity, disdain and pity, a gaze that I think can be summed up in one word: Sucker.

On the flight over, Lena got talking to a Venetian girl on the plane who was wrestling a papier-mâché claw from the overhead luggage compartment.

'There are two carnivals,' she said. 'The street parties are the real Carnival where you'll meet real Venetians. If you go to the organized Carnival parties, all you'll meet is a bunch of Americans.'

Considering that I'd already committed myself to forking out hundreds of pounds for the privilege, this wasn't exactly what I wanted to hear.

And who was this girl anyway? She was going to walk around as a giant lobster.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Feasting and Profanity at Carnival -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 14)

May be—but try not to spoil the ride, okay?

In a desperate attempt to find some trace of the city's decadent past, Lena and I are going to a Carnival ball.

As in the rest of Europe, the tradition dates from the Middle Ages, when the normal rules of society were upended for a week of feasting and profanity before the forty days of fasting and piety ahead of Easter.

In its current tourist-trap incarnation, though, 'the World-Famous Carnival of Venice' dates from 1979, having been resurrected after Mussolini's Fascists stamped it out.

Rather than the city's Renaissance heyday, the modern Carnival harks back to its Age of Decadence in the eighteenth century, when Casanova was one of numerous chancers trawling its canals for an easy lay and/or lunch ticket.

Venice had become the playground of Europe because it was politically impotent.

Foreign aristocrats could indulge their whims without having to worry about the consequences: what happened in Venice, stayed in Venice.

The Enlightenment had created the notion of high society—of seeing and being seen in public—but in Venice, even that was optional.

Between Carnival and the theatre season, Venetians spent roughly five months of the year promenading around in masks.

At a time when Paris had only three public theatres, Venice had thirteen—not to mention Europe's first public gambling establishment, plus dozens of private 'little houses' hidden around the city.

By the time the Venetian Republic fell to Napoleon in 1797, Venice had no fewer than 136 of these 'casinos.'

One of the last surviving casinos from Casanova's heyday... now an office
(Note the portrait from Pompeii, supposedly of Sappho)

The city was particularly popular with British high rollers, partly because their Protestant government frowned on them dallying in Rome but also because of the city's fame as a fleshpot.

Its very name lent itself to puns on 'Venus' and her venereal pleasures.

Long before Byron set up home there (Shelley complained about him haggling with parents for their daughters), Elizabeth I's tutor reported that Venice had 'more liberty to sin than I heard tell of in our noble City of London in years.'

Which was saying something.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- 'The Disneyland of the Arts' -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 13)

'But isn't it difficult to separate the two?'

'I think everyone at a fetish party understands what you can and can't do,' she counters. 'It's a question of feelings. There is a big difference between to seduce and to fock. I can seduce you by talking, but no focking. Seduction is not sex making.'

But just as seduction leads to sex—at least in my dictionary—it seems naïve to think that Fetish in Italy won't follow the same slippery latex slope as BDSM in more secular countries.

I wonder if Italian fetishists can afford to make such semantic distinctions because their society still has an outwardly strict moral code.

Max and Maria can enjoy the thrill of transgression by making night-time raids outside the boundaries, but when every Pietro and Paolo starts doing it, all hell will break loose.

'Catholicism is a strange religion,' Max scoffs. 'It's the religion of hypocrisy.'

'Yes.'

'One thing is what you say, and one thing is what you do.'

To my mind, this sums up the human condition, not to mention every '–ism' going, but Max and Maria seem to think it's specific to the one—and possibly only—religion they know intimately.

'You can do what you want, but you can't talk about it.'

'In Italy, there are swinger parties everywhere. Especially in small cities.'

'Really?' I ask.

Maria puffs out her cheeks and rolls her eyes. 'Yeah.'

'In the morning they are parents, and at night they are swingers.'

But apparently 'everywhere' doesn't include La Serenissima.

'In Venice, there isn't anything.'

'Anything!' Maria echoes.

'No sex.'

'No sex!' she snorts.

Not even modern counterparts to the 'grand horizontals' of yore. High-priced prostitutes fly in for the Venice Film Festival and special events, but there's not enough business to live here full time.

'We are very sorry, but you won't find anything of this in Venice,' Max says.

'We asked,' Maria agrees. 'We asked our friends, and they said no. No, no, no, no, no. No call girls.'

'I think that if you came to Venice looking for sex, you can't find it,' he shrugs. 'Venice is not a real city.'

'Venice is Disneyland. The Disneyland of the arts.'

Not so Disney: Ties on sale during Carnival

* * *

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- 'Fock is Fock' -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 12)

He leans forward for emphasis: 'This is important to know—Venice is no sex, no fetish, none of these things.'

'Venice is love—' Maria clasps her hands to her heart melodramatically—'Love, romantic love. Not sexual love.'

'Just for tourists, because there are too few people here.'

Barely 60,000 locals, at last count—roughly one-third its size in Aretino's time.

'And tourists that come here are looking for romance, not for sex. Not for fetish or transgressive or strange things, no. It's walking hand-in-hand, looking at the Grand Canal.'

'Venetians and tourists are narrow-minded. I don't know why, but it's so.'

'For fetish parties, you need open-minded people.'

Max and Maria's own mindset strikes me as somewhere in between.

A decade after their baptism into bondage, their view of Fetish seems quaintly outdated, akin to the idealists of the Sixties who realized belatedly (if ever) that they'd opened the gates to hucksters who would've turned the Garden of Eden into a peepshow.

Bondage in advertising: A Design Institute billboard...
across from Naples Cathedral

It's odd, for instance, that Max and Maria find it so shocking that parties promoting sexy dress might actually inspire some revelers to have sex.

'But then it's not a fetish party!' Maria exclaims, her accent getting stronger the more worked up she gets.

'A fetish party is a fetish party; a sex party is a sex party; a swingers' party is a swingers' party. I don't like that people use fetish or BDSM—'

'—just to fock.'

'Just to fock. No.'

'Fock is fock.'

'If you want to fock, you go to the parties in which you can fock,' Maria continues. 'But I go with normal clothes, not latex or PVC or high heels. No. I go, I fock. But I don't like there to be an excuse to fock.'

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- The Business of BDSM -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 11)

'Was there any swinging?' I ask, still struggling to square the decadent image of BDSM with the reality they're describing.

'No. It was just like Carnival. It was just to wear what you like and make people look at you and you look at the people.'

However, Maria notes that the foreign scene has changed dramatically since then.

'Yes, there is fetish and BDSM, but also a lot of sex,' she frowns. 'But when we went, no. Now things have changed; it's more of a business now. Before, there was a lot of passion, real passion.'

When she puts it like that, the two of them come across as fetish purists.

Having frequented theme nights while living in Milan—Italy doesn't have any dedicated BDSM clubs—they decided to try and organize some old-school parties in Venice when they moved here a couple of years ago.

The poster for one of Max and Maria's parties

Their debut effort, themed 'Saints and Sinners,' took place during Carnival on a Grand Canal palazzo that looked like a little church.

'The first party… it was very, very…'—Max struggles, as if he's trying to describe something ineffable like a sunset—'…beautiful.'

There's that word again.

'The best.'

The party roped in 300 fellow fetishists, mainly from the Veneto region, who paid €35 each (about $45) to frolic in black-and-scarlet splendor with a king-sized bed in the middle of the dancefloor.

But Max and Maria had splashed out nearly €30,000 on the event.

Despite their massive loss, they persevered in their Venetian dream, hosting two more parties in an attempt to restore Venice's reputation as a center of decadence.

One party took place near the city's holiest of holies—St. Mark's itself—and the local hotels set the police on the revelers.

Maria pinches her forehead in exasperation as Max explains.

'We thought Venice would be the best playground for fetish because it has a long history of sensuality and eroticism. But the problem now is that this is not a city for eroticism or fetish. Venice was the center of libertinism when it was a world power. Now it's like Disneyland.'

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.'

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Klimt Meets Cicciolina -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 9)

I had suggested to Lena the Latin South African that we book a night at Max and Maria's in the name of research.

After all, who could resist getting 'to know an interesting and open-minded family' and 'going to bed surrounded by erotic and ironic artworks?'

But now that I see the paintings in all their eroto-ironic glory, I can understand why she wasn't keen.

Imagine, if you can, pastiches of classical art with the coloring of Klimt and the porn-tastic style of Jeff Koons and Cicciolina, and you'll have a good approximation of Max's work.

In typical postmodern fashion, he uses bondage portraits off the Internet and then recasts them against gilded backgrounds as saints and martyrs.

So a topless blonde bound to a post with her hands above her head becomes eerily reminiscent of poor old St. Sebastian, only with breasts and baby oil.

These images are everywhere, and the wall above the bed features no less than ten women—several with ball gags in their mouths—and one an enraptured nun in a headdress with her breasts out.

It's not that Max's paintings are bad—in their own way, they're actually good—they're just probably not the sort of images you want looming over you in bed.

Add to that the fact that the 'open-minded' landlords are right next door—and Maria's teenaged daughters are just down the hallway—and I reckon I probably wouldn't get much sleep in this B&B.

While surveying the art on the walls, I can't help but wonder:

Where are the hidden webcams?

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.

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Hedging Bets on the Afterlife (Chap. IV, Pt. 7)

Aretino, too, drew on personal experience to write a send-up of the dialogues of Plato and the ancients.

In his satire, a prostitute teaches her daughter the tricks of the trade, including how to resell her virginity and fleece naïve lovers: 'I tell thee as a secret: that Man is most happy whom we most hate and disdain.'

Aretino tactfully set this dirt-dishing in Rome but wrote it while living in Venice, surrounded by at least a dozen girlfriends, mistresses and houseboys.

At the same time, he churned out pious guff, belying the modern view that his was a secular age: many Renaissance men opted to hedge their bets on the afterlife.

In a story that may be too good to be true, the dirty old man supposedly died laughing—at a filthy joke about his sister.

As far as I can work out, Aretino's truly great contribution to history was his championing of Titian among Europe's elite.

In return, the Venetian master painted him at least three times, on one occasion casting him as Pontius Pilate—apparently as a compliment, just as the bronze medallions stamped with Aretino's bust on one side and a penis-haired satyr on the other were meant to reflect the root of the word 'satire' rather than imply that he was a 'dickhead.'

'Besides the medallions stamped or cast in gold, bronze, copper, lead and plaster,' Aretino boasted, 'I have had a lifelike copy made of my portrait on the façade of palaces and had it stamped upon comb boxes, on the frames of mirrors and on majolica platters just like Caesar, Alexander and Scipio.'

* * * 

For all his knowledge of antiquity, you would think Aretino would have learned a thing or two about hubris.

Despite being the sixteenth-century equivalent of the most photographed man on the planet, Aretino is best remembered today, if at all, as a historical footnote, and then mainly for his porno-poetry.

One of Titian's portraits of Aretino

Most Venetians give you a blank look when you ask about him, and there's no marker on his former mansion to distinguish the decaying palazzo from all the others on the Grand Canal.

In fact, I'm standing on the Rialto Bridge, and I'm not even sure I'm looking at the right one.