“Massage, handjob, blowjob: he could easily be getting 2500 euros. And the men are hot.”
It was early Sunday morning in the Piazza Maggiore, the sun barely cresting over the famously unfinished façade of the Basilica of San Petronio. The vast square, which had, the previous day, been crowded with hurried shoppers and weary tour groups, buskers belting out Italian folk songs, and long tables of hen parties glowing orange from all the Aperol spritzes, was nearly empty. Now, it was just a clutch of Spandexed cyclists readied for their weekend ride; an elderly lady in a jaunty cap chastised her poor dachshund for being ‘stupido.’
And seated alone on the steps of the church, a man telling someone a world away his recent revelation about sex work.
He was Australian, judging by his accent, and looked to be in his 20s. Handsome, with a Beatles-esque mop of hair and wiry, heavily inked limbs extending out from his t-shirt and shorts. Insulated by the hour and the language, he seemed utterly unselfconscious about the conversation. But standing at the edge of earshot, I pretended to be fascinated by the church just in case.
“The insane thing about Walter is that he wanted to get to know them first. To go out for a drink, and have a chat. He was really bothered that none of these guys wanted that. I just couldn’t understand it.”
He continued on in that vein for a while, stressing to the person on the other end of the line how mysteriously reluctant Walter was to engage in well-compensated sex work with strangers unless there was some kind of conversation first. Finally, he mixed his metaphors and got to the reveal.
“At some point the other penny dropped,” he said. “I realized that he wanted to be seen.”
It was not what I expected to hear when I set out on a walk around 7.30 that morning. It’s one of my favorite things to do in a city, especially a heavily-touristed one: to get up before most anyone else is out, and move through streets hushed and empty. If you’re lucky, you get a glimpse of a place as it once was, of the hard bones that are the scaffolding beneath the scrim of Escape Rooms and fried ravioli stands.
There was more unexpected to come later that morning. A group of French high school students entered the Palazzo Poggi museum at the same time as i did, and for much of my visit, I jockeyed for position with them as we toured the collection, past the maps and giant tortoiseshells and that suite of gestating wombs.
Finally, though, I found myself alone in a small, darkened room. At the far end of it, a glass case was illuminated, and in it, what looked to be a young woman, draped gracefully over gauzy fabric. Naked except for a triple string of pearls, she lay there in what was clearly meant to be a seductive position, despite the fact that her gut was cut open, and her organs arranged around her like garnishes on a platter of Thanksgiving turkey. Her head was thrown back in what looked a lot more like an orgasm than a death throe.
This, I learned, was La Venerina. In the 1700s, Bologna was the leading center for the production of wax anatomy models. A rival school emerged in Florence soon after, and La Venerina, I learned, was a replica of the so-called Medici Venus made by its most prominent, artist Clemente Susini. Religious strictures at the time prevented physicians from learning anatomy of real cadavers, and so these wax models were meant to stand in for the real thing. In La Venerina’s case, there were seven anatomically correct layers exposed, which the budding surgeon could pull apart until he finally arrived at the surprise, like a prize in a box of Cracker Jacks, hidden in her depths: a tiny fetus.
It was disturbing, and not just because La Venerina’s intestines lay in a heap beside her lifelike body, the unseen made seen. I couldn’t help imagining a group of young doctors-to-be crowded around this lovely nude with the flowing (real) hair. Was her beauty and attitude of sensual abandon meant to suggest a voluptuous submission to death? Represent the old Eros/Thanatos equation? Imply that a woman was most beautiful when dead?
Or was it just a good way to get a bunch of male medical students to pay attention in anatomy class?
Up until that point, all I had been focused on in Bologna was the food. The osterie and pizzerie and gelaterie; the tortellini and mortadella and tigelle; the way that everyone always seemed to be eating: food was so present, so constant, that it was hard to see anything else. But between La Venerina, and that overheard conversation on the steps of San Petronio, I came to realize: there were other appetites pulsing below the surface in Bologna, if only I tried to see them.
What I’m Reading
One of the great things about launching this newsletter is how it’s brought me into the orbit of a lot of other great newsletters and their equally great writers. Here are a few I’ve especially enjoyed this month:
As a former resident of Córdoba and (hopefully not former but honestly, it’s touch and go) travel writer, I am perhaps the ideal reader for Jason Wilson’s post How Things Disappear. But his reflections on the intertwined fates of journalism and the once-celebrated pueblo blanco, Estepa, is masterful.
A Canadian living in Turkey, Natalie Karneef frequently makes me laugh with her newsletter A Broad, about the expat writer’s life. But her beautiful post, The End of the Prayer, about the death of a friend and the communion created around it, brought a different kind of recognition.
The title of this guest post on Wordloaf, Andrew Jarnigan’s wonderful newsletter devoted to all things dough, pretty much explains it all. But if anything, The Tradwives are Making Incredibly Weird Bread is too diplomatic, because that is some seriously sad-ass looking bread.
Wonderful observations
A beautifull blend and set up here. Thank you!