Sex and shamelessness across Europe

Fifty Shades of Grand Tour. The journey of the scions of European nobility to Italy is intoxicating for the senses, there is the scent of lemons, for the eyes bewitched by the glimpses of the Roman Forum and Sicily, the destination of Greekness. They are rich, they are curious and they are young, so, alongside their cultural afflatus, their desire to discover the ancient, these youngsters encounter and recount in their travel diaries a carnal and pleasurable Italy, revealed in Attilio Brilli's book Secret stories of travelling in Italy: "the temptations of sex and the shamelessness with which it is sought, offered and practised, in public and in private, by any category and social level of people, involve writers, artists, scientists, collectors, merchants and above all aristocrats travelling for passion and pleasure, including, albeit to a lesser extent, the more autonomous and uninhibited aristocrats".

From Venice to Turin, from Milan to Rome, to Palermo, there are not only palaces to visit and the sublime of art, but also equivocal situations, not-so-monastic nuns, ménage à trois and travellers thirsty for adventure that make these pages entertaining and incredible, from Goethe to Byron. The book is a thousand and one journeys on that endless journey that was the Grand Tour. Italy is a sort of promised land between the 17th and early 19th century, women of the upper classes have partly conquered some freedom and access to the redemption of the senses, so the diaries, the travel tales are full of love and betrayals, of hidden glances and notes, of veils and garters: the texts are not intended for publication and so inhibitions collapse and it becomes, in Stendhal's words, the land of 'happy love'. It is an Italy that is very true and very much in love, a blender in which there is all the fun of Brilli in having uncovered pages and pages of delight and in having revealed 'the secret, hidden or repressed face of travelling in Italy'.

Each chapter is a script already written. In 1726, the English writer John Durant Breval was thunderstruck by Italy: 'The light with which I have examined these places has introduced me, if I may use these terms, into a Virgin Land, into an auriferous vein that deserves to be probed, which none of our countrymen have done before me, at least by digging deep'. He is serious, the busy traveller, but then he seems to split himself into two, indulging in gossip, salons and reckless love affairs. Like the one with a nun in the Milanese monastery of Santa Redegonda. Another traveller, the Scotsman George Sinclair of Ulbster, acts as 'Novella 2000': in 1737, in his diary, he recounts that Breval promises the nun 'to draw her from the irons and make her his bride', and she agrees. They flee to Venice, Paola in men's clothing, and there is scandal throughout Milan.

There are those who, like Philip Dormer Stanhope, fourth Earl of Chesterfield, send his illegitimate son Philip, at the time British ambassador to The Hague, letter after letter to give him a worldly education and more: Lord Chesterfield's unscrupulous sexual pedagogy is an immediate success, establishing itself as an expression of the cosmopolitan pedagogy of the ancien régime: "Dear my newcomer, do not go and lose yourself with girls from the Opera or with actresses, who would certainly save you money in the display of sentiments and courtesies, but who, on balance, would cost you much more", and, fearing the ravenous prostitutes, he rebukes him: "Get it into your head that the wisest woman, far from being offended, feels flattered by a respectful and courteous declaration of love".

Another globetrotter is Michel Guyot de Merville who, in his Voyage historique d'Italie, particularly extols Siena, a land of ladies and knights, amorous skirmishes and interdictions: 'In Siena, I eat well, drink excellent wine and then I have taken a lover, in other words, I lack nothing'. No less rich in occasion and widespread licence is Venice. Charles de Brosses, a lover of archaeology and exploration in the southern seas, never thought he would make public his Lettres familières sur l'Italie about his voyage in 1739-1740. The city's most coveted attraction is the courtesan, or, if you prefer, the so-called 'honest prostitute', whose wealth, culture and refined manners are linked to the aristocracy and have nothing to do with the common prostitute 'de lume', who marks the spot of the beguilement with a candle.