Flesh, Flash and Sex

A fictional travelogue; four minutes to read.

The Monastery of Santa Chiara in Naples, Italy, is a survivor. In 1943, WWII bombers flattened it. Ten years later, it reopened for worship and contemplation.

Throughout the convent’s courtyard, benches decorated entirely in majolica tiles tell the stories of maritime exploration and rural life in the 1700s. Octagonal columns, also covered with majolica tiles, depict landscapes, sea voyages, floral garlands. Pale yellow, fading green, distant azure twinkle in the sunlight.

A Gothic portico shades frescoes of biblical scenes, allegories, venerated saints. I’m strolling across the pages of the Old Testament.

In the weightless way that nuns often walk, a nun floats by. She has the pretty face of a prepubescent boy. Her pink skin unblemished from laboring under a beating sun. Not a wisp of hair shows. Sexless in her Catholic burqa.

She gazes in my direction. From a different female in a different place, her glance might signal a carnal interest. The sexy fragrance of the citrus trees might seduce me to linger. Instead, her look is a silent finger wag against disturbing the serenity of the cloister.

From the nunnery to nymphomania, my next stop is a Roman peep show. The Naples National Archaeology Museum houses a gigantic collection of art and artifacts excavated from nearby archaeological ruins. Among the finds, a stimulating collection of Roman erotica.

Frescoes painted with pornographic images. Phallic wind chimes awaiting the next breeze. Naughty trysts portrayed with mosaic tiling. Sex acts carved in stone.

One X-rated fresco portrays a male satyr having intercourse with a female goat. To my eyes, the goat looks infatuated with her lover.

In another fresco a buxom dancer swirls her flowing skirts in a flirty frenzy of seduction. Her hair is tussled. Her face flushed.

In Pompeii, the hefty penis of the fertility god Priapus is carved into walls, door lintels, sign posts, pretty much everywhere I look. It symbolically wards off evil and summons good luck (wink, wink). A scrap of graffiti on a wall facing the street boasts: “May I always and everywhere be as potent with women as I was here.”

Near a stone erection attached to a water fountain, a kissing couple in their lustful twenties embrace and rub against each other. I wonder if they get an extra thrill knowing that I am watching their exhibition.

Inside a room once used as a Roman brothel, a gaggle of elderly women in floppy straw hats teeter and balance with help of rubber-tipped metal canes. One jokes, “I used to make chicken brothel.” The others titter.

Pompeii was the Las Vegas of its time. Besides government and commerce, life centered around food and wine, entertainment, pleasures of the flesh, the sybaritic lifestyle. Romans enjoyed their bodily debaucheries.

After a while, Roman lovemaking as an aesthetic experience gets tiresome. A kind of sex-numbness—pleasantly monotonous—overcomes me. The most promiscuous of the senses—my sight—is spent, depleted, exhausted,

Three years into my widowed life, lewd images of sex gut me—a defilement of holding hands with her. Her finger caressing my palm. I want to be where I can bring back my wife.

Outside the gates of Pompeii, I tell my taxi driver, “Santa Chiara, per favore.”

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