Skip to main content

The Naples Archaeological Musuem and Its Penis Room

When the situation calls for it, I am a mature person. I can talk comfortably about reproductive health, I can watch a movie with a sex scene and not make a joke, and I can look at nude statues and think nothing of it beyond art. Hell, my senior yearbook quote was about how maturity is just knowing when and where to be immature. I won't laugh when you fall down because you might be hurt and I absolutely do not laugh when an animal humps something because it's instinct and the animal can't help it. I believe you shouldn't laugh at something if the thing you're laughing at is helpless in the situation.

But sometimes you find your limit.

The National Archaeological Museum of Naples (abbreviated MANN in Italian) pushed me near my limit.

See, Naples is home to brilliant and interesting historical artwork. With the nearby town of Pompeii buried under the ash of Mt. Vesuvius, tons of pristine artifacts which were rescued from Pompeii ended up in MANN. Some of these pieces are hugely famous like the Alexander Mosaic, the Street Musicians Mosaic, or the Dancing Faun.

However, MANN has another feature that draws in visitors. It's called the Secret Room, and while it's not all that secret, it's...well, look.



Look just left of center in this photo. Does something catch your eye? Does it seem like a man is laying on his back, penetrating another person above him?

Your eyes are not lying. The Secret Room is a collection of erotic, graphically sexual art. It is outrageous. Some folks can't get through without laughing, some folks can. I'd like to say that I didn't so much as crack a smile and held firm to my "maturity," but take a look at some of the highlights.



That's not a 5-legged cow, that's a cow with 4 legs and 1 leg-sized penis.



These are, I don't know, penis wind-chimes? But below is the real cake-taker. It's titled "Pan copulating with goat" and that is an appropriate name.



There's a lot more in the Secret Room, but I tried to be a mature adult and not take photos of everything in there. You can read about the fascinating history of the erotic art on the wiki page, here. (A short summary: Ancient Romans viewed sexuality far differently than 1800s and 1900s Romans did. The result was that only educated men were ever allowed to view this art but it was also periodically closed up and locked away in a secret room. They pulled back the restrictions a couple of times before opening it permanently within the past 20 years.)

Naples is one of my favorite cities in all of Italy and there are about 1,000 things you could do that are worth your time. Just know that one of them involves trying not to laugh at sculptures where the focal point is a series of penises.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Excitement

Alright. This is going to get emotional, y'all. Get your tissues. This post is because my brother and sister-in-law are about to have their 2nd child. If we're friends on facebook, you've seen that my profile picture has been some incarnation of myself and their first child for the entire duration of her almost 3-year-long life. Simply, I love that child. But there's another one coming. I'm having that fear that I've been told parents have. The one thing I know for sure is how much I love the kid who already exists, and I don't know if I have the room in my emotional spectrum to unconditionally love another human the way I love the current one. I mean, I'm sure I will. How could I not, right? How could I not love something that's a sibling to this kid? As it stands now, I spend my time in Chicago and fielding questions from people back home about whether or not I'd ever move to NYC or LA (because they clearly know that I'm just...on ...

Being a Real Boy (or teacher, I guess)

Have you guys ever read The Odyssey? You probably have. It's long, Greek, and there are about 75000 names used in it over the course of seemingly a thousand pages. You might also remember it for things like Calypso, a whirlpool, Polyphemus the cyclops, Sirens, and various people being murdered for various things, not to mention the tail-end of the Trojan War being recounted within its pages. The reason it might sound familiar but not-that-familiar is that most people seem to be reading this book between the ages of about 12 and 16. This is one of the most loaded books in the history of ever, and it's complicated enough just to follow the plot (Homer, the author, invented the concept of in medias res , where the story begins in the middle and jumps around a bit through flashbacks and such, a style now known as "The Tarantino" or as "the way that one guy makes those weird movies with lots of violence"), let alone follow all the names involved, the historical...

How do you pick a place?

Traveling is good. Traveling does things to you that staying in one place cannot. But traveling poses one of the most difficult questions that a person can be faced with: Where do you want to go? Most people have a list of places that they'd like to go. Depending on your station in life, that list might include Paris, Tokyo, Disney World, Bora Bora, or Branson, Missouri - all of which are fine choices, if given the right set of circumstances. But that list is probably longer than one place, and you're almost certainly not spending an unlimited amount of time in whichever place you choose, so how you do decide where to go and what to do while you're there? The truth is that it's hard. I'm lucky, I know it. I've been a lot of places - more places than were originally on my "I have to go there before I die" list, if I'm being honest. And yet, I still want to go places. Every time one place gets crossed off the list, another place gets added. Wh...