Orgiastic scenes on mosaics and paintings, not only in private rooms and thermal baths, but also in the street, couples making love, ithyphallic sculptures, obscene graffiti, relief penises pointing the way to the brothel, erotic miniatures on oil lamps and doorbells, Dionysus with the thyrsus rod or Pan doing it with a goat: the omnipresence of eroticism and sensuality, the abundance and variety, clarity and directness of the pictorial works has amazed, frightened and even embarrassed the archaeologists in Pompeii since the beginning in 1748.

What offended “taste” was relegated to the secret cabinet of the National Museum in Naples, which includes about 250 positions and was only accessible by request until 2000.

As late as the 1950s, women, including Marguerite Duras,

who wanted to visit it with Elio Vittorini, who denied entry.

The story of Pompeii also tells of the difficulties with cultural distance and thus of one's own biases and limitations.

Andreas Rossman

Freelance writer in the feuilleton.

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The most recent discoveries in the city on Mount Vesuvius, which sank in 79 AD, have given new emphasis to the subject: in the "House of Leda", which was excavated in 2018, a fresco in richly colored fascinates in a bedroom, which transformed the myth of the swan into a swan depicts Jupiter with bewitching sensuality;

and the processional chariot, which came to light in 2021 in the suburban villa Civita Giuliana north of the city walls, a find hitherto unique in the Romanesque world, are decorated at the stern with medallions depicting erotic scenes (satyrs and nymphs), while the rivets represent erotes – clues that suggest the connection with a wedding.

The "crooked" reception of the topic and the new, sensational contributions have given Gabriel breeding bar, General Director of the Archaeological Park since April 2021, the impetus to bring both aspects together.

His first exhibition, which he curated together with the archaeologist Maria Luisa Catoni, who teaches in Lucca, shows "Arte e sensualità nelle case di Pompei" (Art and sensuality in the houses of Pompeii) and fans them out in their thematic and aesthetic breadth: Not a show of sensations, but a research report translated into visuals, which has unearthed treasures slumbering in the depot for its inventory and has initiated restorations.

How excavating, preserving, collecting, presenting and communicating are related to each other and made understandable in their complex relationship,

The show in the Great Palaestra, where it occupies the western portico and is matched by Greek graffiti on the walls, undertakes a four-step that follows the structure of the Roman house: atrium, cubiculum, triclinium, peristyle.

In the atrium, the visitor is greeted by a fresco of Narcissus gazing adoringly at the water reflecting him, and a white marble statue of Priapus, assembled from many fragments, god of fertility and abundance, whose stately member symbolizes procreative power;

a table leg in the shape of a hermaphrodite and the image of a detailed decorated lararium, the cult shrine of a private domus, stand opposite.