The Pervert’s Grand Tour: A Journey Through the Erotic Underbelly of Europe

• History

An Illustrated Lecture with Tony Perrottet

Sex and travel have always been intertwined, and never more so than on the classic Grand Tour of Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries. Today, the Old World is still littered with salacious remnants of that golden age, where secret boudoirs, notorious dungeons and forbidden artifacts lured travelers all the way from London to Capri.

In this illustrated lecture, historian and author Tony Perrottet will recount how he journeyed across Europe to unearth a string of legendary historical sites and relics traditionally kept far from public view. A forgotten 18th century French text led him inside the dungeon of the Marquis de Sade in a château now owned by French fashion icon Pierre Cardin. An 1883 prostitute guide called The Pretty Women of Paris provided clues to finding the legendary sex throne of King Edward VII. Ancient tomes on Renaissance art pointed the way to the Popes very own apartments in the Vatican, wherein lies the off-limits Stufetta del Bibbiena, a pornography-covered bathroom painted by Raphael in 1516.

En route, Perrottet visited a cache of forbidden Victorian erotica known as the Secretum in the British Museum, a haunted village descended from sex-crazed medieval heretics in the Pyrenées Mountains of France, the perverse relics of the 18th century sex clubs in Scotland, the prison cell of Casanova in Venice and exotic pagan shrines of Capri, still in use.

The climax of the evening will be an unveiling of a replica of Napoleon’s penis, removed at the Emperor’s autopsy in 1821.