Tony Perrottet - The Sinners Grand Tour: A Journey Through the Historical Underbelly of Europe

PRAISE FOR TONY PERROTTET

Pagan Holiday: On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists

A terrifically funny writer this history-cum-travelogue is as enjoyable as it is informative and twice as quirky.

Boston Globe

An appealing mix of the zany and the arcane [Perrottets] insistence on seeing what the ancients saw, no matter the filth, decay, and craven commercialism obscuring most ancient sites, becomes a terrific running gag.

New York Times Book Review

Brilliantly researched and beautifully written.

Rocky Mountain News

The Naked Olympics: The True Story of the Ancient Games

Its so great to have a truly funny (and poetic) writer putting the lurid colors back on the pale marble, where they belong. Its full of the get-a-load-of-this factorthose juicy, vivid stories you cant wait to tell your friends. To my mind, that quality is the distinguishing trait of great nonfiction.

Teller of Penn and Teller,
Las Vegas entertainer (and onetime Latin teacher)

Combining a wealth of vivid details with a knack for narrative pacing and subtle humor an entertaining, edifying account that puts a human face on one of humanitys most remarkable spectacles.

Publishers Weekly

This lively account of the classical Olympics portrays them as the Woodstock of antiquity, and claims that the Games, while taken seriously, were also where Greeks gathered for a five-day debauch.

The New Yorker

Napoleons Privates: 2,500 Years of History Unzipped

A sinfully entertaining survey of perversion.

Salon

Its refreshing to find such an entertaining writer whose history is also meticulously researched. Perrottets take on the past is erudite, original, and wittyeven, frequently, hilarious.

Paul Cartledge, professor of classics, Cambridge University

If Woody Allen had become a historian, he might have come up with Napoleons Privates. Learned, ribald, and very funny.

Chris Ryan, New York Times bestselling author of Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality

ALSO BY TONY PERROTTET

Off the Deep End:
Travels in Forgotten Frontiers

Pagan Holiday:
On the Trail of Ancient Roman Tourists
(originally published as Route 66 A.D.)

The Naked Olympics:
The True Story of the Ancient Games

Napoleons Privates:
2,500 Years of History Unzipped

Copyright 2011 by Tony Perrottet

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Broadway Paperbacks, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

BROADWAY PAPERBACKS and its logo,
a letter B bisected on the diagonal,
are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

All photos, unless otherwise credited, are from the authors collection.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Perrottet, Tony.
The sinners grand tour : a journey through the historical underbelly of Europe / Tony Perrottet.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Sex and historyEurope, WesternAnecdotes. 2. Grand tours (Education)Anecdotes. 3. Perrottet, TonyTravelEurope, WesternAnecdotes. I. Title.
HQ18.E8.P47 2011
914.04dc22 2011001256

eISBN: 978-0-307-59219-4

Cover design by Dan Rembert/Jim Massey
Cover photograph of The Three Graces by
Antonio Canova/ Araldo de Luca/CORBIS

v3.1

For Lesley and the boys

The desire to possess that which is forbidden is as strong in the man as the child, in the wise as the foolish.

Henry Spencer Ashbee,
The Index of Prohibited Books (1877)

It was a classic summers day in Londonthe city was enveloped by veils of dismal rainand as I skulked through the lonely back streets of Bloomsbury, I began to feel like Dr. Jekyll before a binge. Decent folk who passed me by seemed to hasten their step, ducking beneath their umbrellas when they glimpsed my wild eyes.

It was as if they could sense my furtive mission. I was on my way to the British Museum, where I planned to locate the dreaded Secretum, the worlds most extensive cache of historical erotica, and then wallow in its shameful contents.

In the high Victorian age, with Oscar Wilde in the defendant box, fig leafs on every statue and moral watchdogs on every corner, many a guilty-looking gentleman would have trodden this same path to Londons most hallowed institution. But instead of admiring the respectable exhibits, these discerning types would have slipped through the crowds to meet a museum official, the Keeper of the Secretum. Letters of introduction were presented, written by trustees or college dons, and then the visitor (who might have been accompanied, on rare occasions, by a female companion or two) would be ushered down a dark stairway to the North Basement, to wait for a door to be unlocked.

As the blue flames of the gas lamps spluttered to life, shelves full of writhing limbs emerged from the darknessnaked lovers carved in marble, satyrs in gold leaf on parchment, bronze phalluses of astonishing proportions. For the delectation of the chosen few, the Secretum offered an array of historical artifacts that were considered too obscene for public display. Cultures that the Victorians could barely dream of were here, brazenly enjoying themselves in every possible manner.

It must have seemed like a shrine to forbidden pleasure.

The Secretum was created in 1866, at the height of the eras sexual hysteria, to protect the public from the moral perils of history. The year before, 434 ancient phallic objects had been donated by a freethinking doctor named George Witt, who had made his fortune in Australia from banking. Dr. Witt was convinced that all world religions had begun with phallus worship, and had gathered around him a clique of wealthy phallus collectors who supported his thesis. While accepting the bequest, the British Museum trustees voted to allocate a special room where the Witt Collection could be examined in suitable privacy. The room was quickly supplemented with obscene treasures from all historical periods. British archaeologists and academics had long been returning from their journeys around the world with shocking depictions of guilt-free sex. By the 1890s, the Museum Secretum, Secret Museum, boasted over 1,100 wicked objects.

Today, we can get a detailed idea of the chambers contents from the Secretum Acquisitions Register, a leather-bound tome where each new arrival was carefully noted. Preserved in the museum archives, the Register makes entertaining reading. The word