The Sinner's Grand Tour

by Tony Perrottet

  The Church denial grew more intense after 1870, when Pius IX was forced to abandon control of Rome and retreat behind the fortified walls of the Vatican Palace. What really lay within that 110-acre enclave on the left bank of the Tiber became the subject of rumor and speculation, especially among the anticlerical elements of Italian nationalists, who advocated expelling the pope from Rome entirely. It was said that the Vatican Library contained the world’s largest collection of pornography. (A not illogical notion, since the Church list of banned books, the Index, had been going strong for centuries, and a copy of each volume was kept.) Underground tunnels were thought to be decorated with hardcore obscenities. (The story was perhaps inspired by the Passetto di Borgo, a real eight-hundred-yard-long passageway that links the Vatican Palace with the Castel Sant’Angelo, and was used by Pope Clement VII to escape during the 1527 sack of Rome.) A special chamber was believed to contain hundreds of male genitalia lopped from marble statues and replaced by fig leafs. (Well, the Vatican did gather the world’s greatest concentration of classical art, which became subject to odd censorship attempts over the years.)

  Sign to the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican Museums; fig leaves figure prominently in Papal mythology.

  But the most improbable story of all happens to be quite true: In the heart of the pope’s private residence, a bathroom was covered with erotic paintings by Raphael.

  Almost from the day it was created in 1516, the so-called Stufetta del Bibbiena (the “little heated room,” or bathroom, of Cardinal Bibbiena) has been the Vatican’s most mysterious site. Hidden in the top floor of the Papal Apartments, its wicked array of frescoes was commissioned by Cardinal Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, the charming and worldly secretary to Pope Leo X. Even among the sophisticated clerics of Rome, Bibbiena stood out as the proverbial Renaissance man, an energetic party host and the author of a risqué theatrical comedy, La Calandria, whose scenes of adultery and cross-dressing delighted Roman high society. He had also been one of Raphael’s closest friends since the pair had been teenagers in Rome. When Bibbiena wanted something provocative for the decor of his Stufetta, he knew whom to ask. Raphael was an obsessive womanizer who often dabbled in erotica. (He was even engaged to Bibbiena’s own niece for several years but was too enamored of philandering to commit to marriage.)

  The inspiration for the Stufetta came, quite literally, from underground. Like other Roman artists, Raphael had been lowered with ropes and torches into the recently discovered catacombs of Emperor Nero’s Golden Palace on the Quirinal Hill. The colorful interior designs inspired an immediate vogue for erotica in the “grotesque” style. (The word’s original meaning was “common to ancient grottos”; later, it came to mean anything monstrous or misshapen). Bibbiena chose as the theme the triumphs of Venus and Cupid, which would have also appealed to his master, the pope. Leo X was from the Medici family of Florence, raised to love art and literature, and had a cultivated interest in all things classical. He also pampered himself splendidly—he is said to have declared on his election by the Sacred College, “God has given us the Papacy, now let us enjoy it!”—and took to parading through Rome with a white elephant in his entourage.

  In 1516, Raphael executed the drawings for two dozen raunchy scenes, which were painted on fifteen-inch stucco panels across the walls and ceiling of the vaulted bathroom. Some images the maestro painted himself; others were completed under his supervision by his workshop staff. Cardinal Bibbiena had also hoped to include a nude statue of Venus in the room, but it wouldn’t fit into the wall niches. Another cardinal, his friend the poet Pietro Bembo, took it for his own pagan-themed lodgings, boasting in a letter that he would “desire her [Venus] more every day than you ever could.”

  News of the entangled lovers, priapic satyrs, and curvaceous goddesses spread around Rome, and friends of both Raphael and Bibbiena came to admire the work. But after the untimely deaths of both patron and artist in 1520, visits by outsiders grew less common. Thirty years later, even Giorgio Vasari, the famous biographer of Renaissance artists, was unable to gain access at all, lamenting that “the frescoes are still in existence, but are not open to the public.” Still, Raphael’s students circulated a number of engraved copies of the panels, providing tantalizing clues. The most notorious image involves the half-goat god Pan with a monstrous erection about to leap from some bushes upon a luscious naked nymph, who is casually combing her hair, her legs slightly apart.

  One of the only outsiders to gain a viewing at the time was a German scholar named Johannes Fichard in 1536. (It’s not known how.) To Fichard, the bathroom confirmed his own belief in the Papacy’s shameless immorality: “Here, seated in a tub, His Holiness washes with hot water which is supplied by a bronze female nude. There are also other nudes, and I have no doubt that these are touched with great devotion.” In the following centuries, Vatican residents also scorned the Stufetta. In the 1700s, the room was converted into a kitchen, when one of the panels was completely destroyed to make room for a cupboard. Then it became a storeroom. It was only in 1835 that the chamber was mentioned in an obscure German academic’s monograph on Raphael, and interest in it revived. But chances of outsiders viewing the artworks remained slim.

  The possibility grew even less likely when the Vatican Palace became the Pope’s gilded prison in 1870. For nearly two millennia, the Pontiff had ruled the entire city of Rome, but in the 1860s, troops supporting the unification of Italy seized the Papal States, and finally stormed the Eternal City. Pope Pius IX fell back with his supporters to the Vatican complex, which, perhaps not surprisingly, began to exude a siege mentality. No pope even set foot outside the palace for nearly sixty years, until Mussolini recognized it as its own tiny state in 1929. Renovations were made to fit the pope and his bureaucrats in the thousand-room complex. Cardinal Bibbiena’s bedroom became part of the Papal Apartments and was converted into the reception room for official meetings with foreign dignitaries. Evidently, the door to the grubby little Stufetta next door was kept firmly closed.

  I wasn’t sure of the room’s current condition or even if it had been bricked up. In the 1970s, I’d read, the esteemed British art historian Peter Webb, author of the classic text The Erotic Arts, found that many Vatican officials denied the Stufetta’s existence; others simply ignored his repeated requests to see it. Today, with the current welter of Catholic scandals, the Holy See has little to gain from opening an erotic bathroom.

  It remains the most secret corner of the Secret City.

  When I first e-mailed friends canvassing for ideas on how to get into the Stufetta, I received some less than reverent responses.

  “You mean the Pope has a special room for whacking off?” wrote an investigative journalist from Boston. “I love it.…”

  “If you see a 50 Euro note on the floor,” advised Andrea, an Italian photographer, “don’t bend over!”

  As I expected, the papal bureaucracy is just as formidable today as it was 150 years ago. It does have a nice website, but the inner workings remain totally obscure. You need a confirmed appointment just to set foot inside Vatican City, but how you obtain one is unexplained. Attempts to Google names of officials simply come up blank.

  “What the hell did you expect?” said a friend in New York who had actually worked with the Vatican. “A pornographic bathroom? They’ll never let you near it!”

  MISSION IMPOSSIBLE

  In Rome, we checked into the venerable and gritty Albergo Sole al Biscione, an inn that dates from the Renaissance, when it took in pilgrims from all over Europe. Even then it was a historic site, with the ground floor horse stables built into the very ruins of the ancient Theater of Pompey. Dragging our bags through the Campo dei Fiore, I told Les about the American journalist Lyman Abbott, who visited Rome for Harper’s magazine in 1872 and who argued that home guesthouses run by down-on-their-luck noble families were far more atmospheric than overpriced grand hotels: “With their covered terraces, their obscure corridors, their tumbling staircases, their unsw
ept halls, they are repulsive to the housekeeper, but attractive to the antiquary,” Abbott wrote.

  Today, the Albergo is still family-run, as we discovered upon meeting the old padrino and his wife, who took a liking to Henry, with his book on Roman gladiators. Instead of the usual monastic cell, they gave us a bright room on the roof, with a view of ornate church cupolas. There was a symmetry to staying by the Campo dei Fiore, I rejoiced, as we lounged at one of the square’s cafés. In the center of the marketplace stands a statue of an ominous, hooded figure—Giordano Bruno, a philosopher who was burned at the stake here in 1600 by the Inquisition for his heretical musings. It had been erected in 1889, with Bruno deliberately glowering in the direction of St. Peter’s, and immediately became a rallying point for anti-Vatican protesters, who took to the streets chanting “Death to the priests!” and “Death to the butchers of the Inquisition!” The riots grew so violent that the pope considered fleeing to Spain. Even today, on the anniversary of Bruno’s immolation, February 17, well-wishers leave flowers at the statue’s feet.

  “Really?” Les said distractedly, as she scanned the menu. “Let’s have the mozzarella di bufala tasting plate.”

  I was beginning to suspect that nobody shared my Vatican obsession. I was driven on by my mad Irish Catholic upbringing, which scarred me for life, but Les was raised in the rain forests of Australia like a godless sprite, and our wayward progeny were just as likely, in the East Village, to end up baptized into some voodoo cult. The idea of visiting the sacred Christian sites, even St. Peter’s Basilica, provoked reactions from baffled indifference to open hostility. It was too hot for sightseeing anyway; they demanded pagan pleasures. I had to compromise. We didn’t even join the lines at the Colosseum; instead, we walked straight past the buskers in their legionnaire’s costumes, heroically posing for photos under the blistering sun, to another attraction next door on the Caelian Hill. Here, every summer, the city sets up a luxury swimming pool complex where, for a modest fee, you can swim, eat panini, and drink pinot grigio while gazing up at Rome’s most illustrious ancient monument. This was no tawdry French municipal affair. The Italians didn’t bother with lifeguards, let alone rules or regulations, but style was all-important. So we sprawled in the sun like Renaissance artists on sabbatical. The other guests were rich Italian kids, magnificently bronzed, chilling out between trips to Rimini.

  The pope’s bathroom could wait another few days, I hoped.

  When I finally ventured into St. Peter’s Square, it was packed with fresh-faced pilgrims. A bevy of Third World saints were about to be canonized, and their portraits hung on huge banners above the basilica doors like Stalinist icons. Around the corner at the Vatican’s main entrance, teams of Swiss Guards in their jaunty blue berets stood beneath a stone archway, turning away sightseers who accidentally approached. Wherever you looked, there were religious supply stores pushing life-size statues of Jesus, Eucharist holders, priest’s robes, souvenir mangers. It was enough to give a lapsed Catholic nightmares.

  The main entrance to the Vatican City, the Porta di Santa Anna.

  At the pope’s very own press office, a Mussolini-era building on the Via della Consiliazione, I pressed the buzzer.

  A voice crackled over the intercom: “Pronto?”

  Sister Giovanna, who met me inside, was a lovely old nun who appeared in full regalia of gray habit, white wimple, and horn-rimmed spectacles. Naturally, I didn’t blurt out that I wanted to inspect the dreaded Stufetta del Bibbiena. Instead, I said that I was researching a sober academic subject—“the influence of pagan imagery on Renaissance art.” Sister Giovanna just smiled beatifically and explained that I had come to completely the wrong place. Her office only issued press releases from the pope. But she did give me some actual names and e-mails where I might start, and she let me visit the Vatican Press Center, which was lined with vintage computers and phone booths like NASA control in the 1960s. Amazingly, the computers still worked—a small miracle in Italy, where it can still take ninety minutes to send an e-mail from an Internet café.

  When I went to my own website to check something, I got a pop-up screen: THIS SITE IS BLOCKED DUE TO INAPPROPRIATE CONTENT. Egad, I thought. If the Vatican officials Googled me, I’d be doomed.

  STORMING THE HOLY SEE

  I did notice one crack in the pope’s bureaucratic defenses that might be exploited. Scholars can worm their way into the Vatican City via the Secret Archive.

  Why exactly the pontiff keeps calling his document trove the Archivium Secretum was something of a mystery to me. Didn’t he realize that the word secret acts on certain people like a red flag to a bull? Dan Brown in Angels and Demons imagines it as a subterranean Bond villain’s lair, with titanium elevators, bulletproof glass, and high-tech surveillance cameras. All I knew was that it must be full of incriminating documents, ripe for examination—including, perhaps, material relating to the Stufetta. What’s more, it was my most obvious way to penetrate the Forbidden City. If I could get inside the Secret Archive, I might be able to use it as a base for exploring the Vatican’s hidden recesses. Needless to say, that was quite a big if.

  Since the late nineteenth century, only a small number of approved scholars have been allowed into the archive, which is unique in the world for the continuity of its records, many spanning back to the 1200s without a break; the oldest date from the 800s. The rules of access have been slightly relaxed since 1998, but the Vatican gatekeepers still remain wary of outside researchers, whom they regard as scandalmongers. A reader’s pass is only granted after a grueling interview in Italian, with officials famously looking for reasons to refuse. Browsing is forbidden. Applicants have to request specific documents—a tricky business, since nobody is entirely sure what’s actually inside the archive. (It has fifty-two miles of shelves, largely uncataloged.) Writer friends in New York who had tried to gain a card with perfectly legitimate topics were invariably rejected without a second chance. My own first e-mail request for an interview provoked the curt reply that “access … can only be granted to Cardinals, Bishops, Ambassadors and selected groups from Universities, but not to private persons.” I tried again. After all, I’ve put in a few hours as an adjunct at New York University. That did the trick.

  In order to invent a plausible topic, I tracked down the only book on the holdings, by Francis X. Blouin Jr., who had been allowed to make a very limited inventory in 1998. Even to Blouin, Vatican archivists had not been overly helpful, with several juicy-sounding caches of documents withheld (“Not open for research and its holdings are not generally known”) or simply lost (“No records located”). The most glaring restriction is that nothing after 1939 may be requested at all, covering sensitive material on the Vatican’s dealings with the Nazis over the Holocaust and recent pedophilia scandals.

  On the morning of my interview, I nervously shaved, dusted off my suit, polished up my shoes—the dress code is listed on the website—and stumbled downstairs. The hotel padrone looked me up and down and muttered: “What happened, you’ve turned into a banker now?”

  “I’m off to see the pope,” I said.

  “Va bene,” he shrugged. “Give him a kiss from me.”

  The Vatican guards first directed me into a tiny wood-paneled office, where office workers could be seen beyond an antique glass barrier, like bank tellers in a 1930s movie. This was basically Vatican Immigration and Customs, which I would eventually dub Checkpoint Charlie. I handed over my passport and letter of appointment in exchange for a pass which I clipped to my jacket.

  “Through there?” I asked, pointing to a closed door at the other end of the room. The official gave me an Italian gesture of exasperation. What do you think?

  Inside Vatican City! Only a few yards from the main gate, but I already felt I was in a different plane of reality. Grinning idiotically, I set off toward the archives, feeling that even the most prosaic scene was exotic. Maybe I could find the world’s only ATM with instructions in Latin! The Vatican supermarket! The Vatican gas s
tation! Clerics in flowing black robes and crimson skullcaps swept by, muttering in hushed tones, while other priests wearing backpacks were jabbering into cell phones. Two nuns drove by in a VW Beetle. Limousines disgorged monsignors from who knows where.

  The Porta di Santa Anna from inside the Vatican City.

  I stared up at the Papal Apartments, hovering above it all with huge picture windows. Raphael’s bathroom was somewhere inside.

  But my first step on the ladder was an institutional hallway. Two empty chairs sat outside a frosted glass door, which looked disturbingly like a school principal’s office. I could hear someone being interviewed inside, so I sat down and began to fret. Memories of my twisted Catholic education flooded back. In elementary school, nuns would give us coloring books of the souls of the damned burning in hell. Later, priests would thrash Latin verbs into us with a leather strap. I was always violating some hidden Church code, inducing an eternal blend of guilt and panic. Matters got worse when I tried out as an altar boy at age nine. I only lasted one day. I got the choreography wrong during the Mass, crossing in front of the altar with a chalice full of wafers. The Irish priest angrily chewed me out and kicked me off the altar boy team forever.

  To distract myself, I perused a display case of Vatican souvenir pens engraved with celebrity signatures taken from Secret Archive documents, including Galileo Galilei’s. You had to admire their chutzpah, spinning a profit from Inquisition victims. Like the German government selling Anne Frank coffee mugs.