What travel destination can withstand so much attention? The ease of modern transport has swamped Capri with admirers more interested in Dolce and Gabbana than Homeric lore. And yet the mythic pull of Capri can’t be ignored. I had to find out if the pagan spirit had reinvented itself for the modern age or sunk like a stone into the Med.
THE FOUNTAINHEAD OF SIN
However, before any of us were going to swim with the fishes, we had to make a pit stop. I reminded Les and the boys that no Grand Tourist could travel to this part of Italy without visiting a certain archaeological site in the shadow of Mount Vesuvius.
Scholars have spilled oceans of ink on what Pompeii tells us about the ancient Romans’ sex lives, but the most intriguing debate is over how many brothels the town had. The issue has been dubbed, endearingly, the Pompeian Brothel Problem. In the Victorian age, historians decided every house containing an erotic painting must surely be a lupanar (a den of “she-wolves,” Roman slang for prostitutes) and concluded that there were thirty-five of them, which makes one for every seventy-five free male inhabitants. More recently, scholars have realized that cultivated Romans enjoyed having erotic pictures that we might consider too graphic on display in their homes, and they were particularly fond of giant penises, which were considered comic. (The ideal male body shape, seen on most statues, was actually a “dainty” penis.) As a result, some argued that only one building in Pompeii was actually a formal brothel. Clearly, argues the historian Mary Beard in her detailed treatment of the issue, the number was somewhere in between. But judging from studies of graffiti, paid sex could be arranged in a variety of ancient locales, including inns, latrines, backrooms in the theater, and gladiatorial arenas. (The Italian archaeologist Antonio Varone has carefully compiled hundreds of these graffiti in his exhaustive anthology Erotica Pompeiana: Love Inscriptions on the Walls of Pompeii. This weighty tome includes a vocabulary I certainly never saw in my high school Latin books, including endless references to mentula, the male organ, and cunnuliggeter, “a person accomplished at the art of oral sex.” Most of the scrawls are rather basic, along the lines of Hic ego multas puellas futui, “Here I fucked many girls,” or Felix bene futuis, “Lucky guy, you fuck well.” Among the more complex attempts is the plaintive Hic ego cum domina resoluto clune peregi tales sed versus scribere turpe fuit: “Here I have penetrated my lady’s open buttocks, but it was vulgar of me to write these verses.”)
Pompeii’s one undeniable brothel on Via dell’Abbondanza has been the most famous site in Pompeii ever since it was excavated in 1862. And like everyone else, I took the whole family inside the mud-walled labyrinth with its stone cubicles above which are famous painted images showing a variety of sexual positions, possibly the specialties of the house. Henry looked up at the postures with mild curiosity, noting that one male appeared to have two penises, then ran back outside squeaking Wiener! Wiener! Sam was terrified by a black dog that came loping through.
I hope they’re not scarred for life.
To get the full picture of Roman sex, I sought out the Suburban Baths, which were only excavated in 1986. This luxury edifice once had an array of steam rooms and a sun terrace with sea views, but it is notorious today for a chamber with eight well-preserved scenes of copulation that appear to be satirical depictions of taboo sexual positions.
When we arrived, I was appalled to find that the baths were closed for repairs. Standing forlornly, I noticed two old guards sitting in the shade. The workers at Pompeii have legendary status: Many are descended from eighteenth-century excavators and have in recent decades been tapped by the Camorra, or Neapolitan mafia, to pillage antiquities. These two characters were definite Fellini extras, one lacking front teeth, the other with a deformed hand. I asked if there was anything they could do to show me the baths.
“Impossible,” they said, with grins that said the opposite.
I folded up a €20 note, crisp and fresh from the ATM, and presented it with my card. The older of the pair took it without looking at it. For a second, I thought he would refuse to acknowledge my offer. But then he lurched to his feet.
“Andiamo,” he said, over his shoulder.
He removed the gate’s rope like a nightclub bouncer and invited me to advance down some stairs. The damp chambers disappeared in various directions, but my guide knew exactly what I was looking for. Of the images near the ceiling, one appears to show two women in bed, among the only lesbian scenes ever found in ancient art; it is difficult to be sure, but one appears to be using a strap-on dildo. In another, a man is giving oral sex to a woman—again rare, because cunnilingus was frowned upon by Roman men as “unclean.” (Not everything was accepted in the ancient world, and sex was often complicated by issues of social status. For example, relations between men were not frowned upon per se, but it was shameful for an upper-class man to be penetrated by a social inferior. The aristocrat had to do the penetrating—a situation the historian John R. Clarke helpfully calls the He-Who-Must-Insert Rule.) There are two group sex scenes, one a trio, another a foursome, the latter with a woman giving oral sex to another woman.
Below each fresco was a number in Roman numerals, and a shelf, whose purpose has exercised scholars. It’s possible that the slave girls who worked in the baths doubled as prostitutes, with the numbered paintings as a visual menu (“I’ll take the rear-entry position”). But Mary Beard argues more convincingly that this was simply a male changing room for the baths, and that the numbered shelves held baskets for the clients’ belongings. The lewd paintings were used as a saucy memory aid. (“My clothes are in the rear-entry box.”)
Beard adds one curious twist to the scenario. All eight scenes had actually been painted over with plain wallpaper patterns before Vesuvius’s eruption.
“Maybe even some Pompeiians had … had enough of pictures of sex.”
Not me. Passing through Naples, I insisted we try to inspect the mother lode of ancient erotica. For centuries, all the hardcore finds from Pompeii and Herculaneum were transported to the National Museum of Archaeology and sealed away in the Gabinetto Segreto, or Secret Cabinet. Created in 1816, it became the most sought-after cache of filth in Europe, considered so disgraceful that in 1849 it was even bricked up for several years so that “its memory could, as far as possible, be dispelled.” Women have only been allowed inside the small gallery since the year 2000, and minors under the age of eighteen are still banned. All this makes the Secret Cabinet so popular today that you need a timed ticket to enter.
I was expecting a mob scene, but the grand old museum was strangely silent. A handwritten sign at the ticket booth read that a staff strike would close the museum at 1:00 p.m. Ah, Italy! There was only one hour left. We rushed past the empty entrance, along echoing corridors. Whole galleries were left unattended. We could have walked out with a handful of Roman bracelets. The Gabinetto Segreto was hard to miss, identified as it was by a big sign that reads GABINETTO SEGRETO. A smaller sign warned that it is X-rated and bambini are not admitted. But even Italians can’t keep up the pretense that the cabinet is still shocking. The ticket post was abandoned, so we all wandered inside.
“Why is this stuff locked up?” Henry asked. He couldn’t really see what all the fuss was about, as we examined the scenes of nymphs by the Nile and wind chimes made from iron phalluses. As Sam frisked about, bothering the more serious connoisseurs, I tried in vain to explain the history of censorship and how the phallic imagery of the Romans, which was thought to ward off the evil eye, was thought to be rude.
We paused before one of the stranger Roman images, a painting of the god Priapus weighing his enormous penis in a scale. Henry looked at it for a second, knitted his brow, then let out a raucous laugh.
It was as comical now as it probably had been in antiquity.
THE ISLAND OF DREAMS
When we finally made it to the docks of Capri, I ran off to find a taxi while, unbeknownst to me, Les sat on her suitcase to tell the boys a horror story. When I returned, they were kneel
ing at her feet, listening with rapt attention and shooting me accusing glances. I already knew the plot. She was telling them about the last time we had come to Capri, when she was pregnant with Henry, and I’d put her through hell.
We had been traveling through Italy, researching material for my first book. Like most people these days, we decided to visit Capri on a simple day trip from Naples. Les had stopped getting morning sickness, and the weather that day was sublime. Italians rave about the giornatta perfetta, perfect day, when the sky is cloudless, the sea is calm, and the olives succulent, and this one qualified—almost. The evening was so warm and seductive, I’d argued, why not have dinner on the island and leave on the very last hydrofoil at eleven p.m.? Les had been more cautious, but I persuaded her. Sure enough, when we arrived at the docks, we found that the last hydrofoil had been canceled. This would hardly have been tragic, except that this was a Saturday night, and the entire island had been taken over for a festival of Italian TV soap operas. There was, quite literally, not a single room free. We visited one grand hotel after another, being repeatedly turned away by innkeepers indifferent to our Jesus-and-Mary routine. We even came back to the Marina Grande with the intention of sleeping on a ferry, but the ships were kept at freezing temperatures to discourage the rats. By now, Les was starting to look wan. After hiking all over the island, she’d already pushed herself to the limit.
We cowered in a smoke-filled bar until four a.m., surrounded by Capri’s teenage in-crowd as they cavorted and lap-danced as if there were no tomorrow. Finally, when it closed, we staggered past the palatial Hotel Las Palmas, where Orson Welles and Marlon Brando had stayed. Les insisted I inquire yet again. This time the gods smiled! One guest had failed to arrive (on that last hydrofoil), so a room was available. It was, of course, the penthouse suite, a mere $450. We took it, crawled into bed, slept for three hours, then had to catch the first hydrofoil back to Naples next morning.
Henry and Sam looked at me with troubled expressions. “Daddy always pushes things too far,” Les said sweetly. I had a feeling they knew that already.
“Do we have a place to stay now?” Henry asked.
I reassured them we did. This time I would redeem myself. Capri is where all sins are forgiven, after all.
Admittedly, our expedition from Naples hadn’t been in the lap of luxury. Every inch of the local Circumvesuviano (Around Vesuvius) train was tattooed with graffiti like a 1970s subway carriage out of Serpico. The heat pulsed through open windows, along with the scent of sulfur from volcanic vents. To reach the ferry in Sorrento, we dragged our luggage down one thousand stone steps to the port until the wheels of Les’s bag broke. Then, for unknown reasons, the ferry captain wouldn’t let passengers outside for fresh air. Inevitably, Sam turned green, then threw up his lunch onto Les’s lap. In Capri, the docks of Marina Grande were in chaos. This was the last week of the Italian summer holidays, and the island was as frenzied as Martha’s Vineyard over Labor Day.
I was grateful that I’d found us a quaint artists’ studio, on the quieter southern side of the island. It had to have great views, I enthused, as we zigzagged up the hairpin bends of the cliffs in one of Capri’s white convertible Mercedes taxis. We would look out over the famous Fariglioni, the three stone spires of the island that jut out of the sea like the Clashing Rocks in Jason and the Argonauts.
As I hoisted our luggage up the steps to our new abode, I sensed that all was not well. The lawn was bleached, the plants withered in their vases. The room was far smaller, and much darker, than the cheery photographs on the Internet site suggested. We quickly realized the “artist’s studio” was in fact the former servant’s quarters in the basement of a grand villa. Right on top of our heads, a gracious terrace with white columns and a bougainvillea-swathed pagoda commanded the seas, while our compact “balcony” took in the details of telephone poles. I cringed at the possibility of Italian rap stars flicking cigarette ash on our heads during their all-night parties. The sun was blasting into our windowless cell, and I could already spot mosquitoes hovering in cobwebbed corners.
The agent, Anna, a big-boned Ukrainian blonde, was keen to hand over our keys and abscond. She bellowed her every word at the top of her lungs, perhaps thinking it would make her thick Italian easier to understand. Shouting and waving her arms constantly, she pointed out the studio’s eccentricities, like the cupboard doors that would not open, table legs held together with wire, and the primitive gas cooker with only one working burner. But even she couldn’t ignore Les’ brewing, Vesuvius-like anger.
“No te piace?” she finally yelled at Les. You don’t like it?
“Purgatorio!” Les said, remembering her Dante.
Anna made a grunt of indifference. “Egh!”
Les was ready to demand our money back and look for somewhere else.
Anna barked, “È alta stagione!” It’s high season.
Unpleasant memories were being evoked. Les looked ready to head for the Hotel Las Palmas and demand her old suite back. I suggested that if we bought some electric fans, maybe it was livable.…
Then Anna thundered, “One last thing …!”
She turned on the taps in the shower stall, and they gurgled dry.
“Workers came today. Now no hot water!”
Les was speechless.
“But no problem!” Anna said. “You come upstairs!”
Baffled, I followed her up to the villa above. I expected to interrupt a gaggle of tanned millionaires guffawing over their cocktails, but no, it was actually derelict, like a Sunset Boulevard mansion in decay. Its white columns were overgrown with vines, which continued clawing their way across the faience tile patio. But the most cinematic aspect was the view. I literally stopped in my tracks, stunned. The forty-foot-wide terrace commanded the entire horizon, from the Marina Piccola, or Small Harbor, far down below, to the jagged fingers of the Fariglioni, both sides framed perfectly by the soaring cliffs. These vertiginous drops were the “galloping rocks” of Capri, described by the Italian Futurist poet Marinetti in the 1920s, which provided the residents “exclusive balconies for elegant suicides.” There wasn’t a better view in all the island.
Anna shouldered open a doorway of the villa, revealing an alcove full of antique iron bed frames and mattresses with horsehair tufts protruding. By contrast, at the far end was a huge bathroom, completely renovated with the latest designer fittings, and a vast marble tub.
“Ecco!” Anna yelled as the water surged forth from the tap. “You use this!”
“So nobody is even staying up here in the villa?”
Anna shrugged. “Needs more work!”
“Which means this terrace …?”
Our terrace view, to the Fariglioni.
“Use it, I don’t care.”
Downstairs, Les had our luggage ready to drag back to the street.
“Actually, hon,” I whispered, as I tried to get rid of Anna before she changed her mind, “I think this place will be fine, better than fine.…”
That night, I tracked down the last two electric fans for sale on Capri from an old hardware vendor hidden among the Gucci and Bulgari stores. I also managed to collect some pasta and local wine from a vineyard called Tiberio in honor of the lecherous old emperor. While I tried to figure out the Italian assembly instructions for the fans, Les got the gas burner working for dinner, and Henry and Sam made a flurry of watercolors to decorate the walls. We carried the meal up to the old villa terrace, and by candlelight watched the moon rising over the Mediterranean, the lights of a hundred yachts sparkling across the water. After the tensions of the day, we were all a little delirious. The boys had found a vintage boom box with a Tina Turner cassette tape in it and began leaping about to the music like dervishes. Les and I eventually joined in.
It was a fair approximation of a bacchanal. Maybe Capri could deliver the pagan goods after all.
THE GREAT GOD PAN WEARS ARMANI
Living beneath the haunted villa was both fabulous and creepy. Every mo
rning, I’d wake up at five a.m. and ascend to the timeless, overgrown balcony, enjoying a William Holden moment as I watched the sun erupt from the molten ocean. Only once did I push open a side door to poke around. The furniture was Mussolini-era and buried in a carpet of dust. There were mountains of old periodicals and a black armoire with all its recesses locked tight. I crept up some stairs to a boarded-up bedroom before losing my nerve. There were just too many unexplained noises up there. Soon the boys refused to stay on the terrace at all after dark. Even Les kept her spells in the marble bath short, returning with a different theory every day about who had once lived in the villa. It was a schizophrenic existence. By day, we cavorted on the terrace as if we were the Prince of Monaco, Grace Kelly, and family. By dusk, we became the gremlins in the cellar.
In ancient times, wealthy Romans came to Capri to indulge in otium, or “educated leisure,” which involved strolls along the sands and musing on philosophy. I tried to kick back for a little Italian dolce far niente, “the joy of doing nothing,” hanging out by the beach, drinking white wine, and nibbling olives. Just existing in the moment.
It didn’t really work. I couldn’t help thinking that the resilient pagan traditions on Capri weren’t quite dead and buried but somehow reincarnated.
One afternoon, I noticed a poster in town—I Paroli degli Dei, the Words of the Gods, with a drawing of a Greek satyr playing a reed flute. Capri’s annual festival was dedicated to the god Dionysius, with artsy events being held in spectacular historical sites. This I had to see. The following evening, I marched everyone through the lemon groves to the Villa Lysis, an art nouveau version of a Greek temple, built on the edge of a thousand-foot-high cliff. The sunset glittered from gilded mosaics on the columns, above which a jaunty motto was emblazoned in Latin, SACRED TO LOVE AND PAIN.
The Sinner's Grand Tour Page 22