KEY POINTS:
Every generation believes it invented sex. Yes, when you're at school, there are some unmistakable pointers that suggest people were sexually adventurous in previous eras: the unbelievably filthy 1748 novel Fanny Hill, for example, or Ovid's erotic Ars Amatoria trilogy written around the time of Christ.
But with the solipsism of youth it's easy to consider such relics purely academic. Unless, that is, you visit the National Archaeological Museum of Naples' collection of ancient erotica, mainly excavated from nearby Pompeii and Herculaneum in the 18th century.
Here, the knowledge that thousands of years ago people were indeed having sex - and some fairly adventurous sex at that - is so unmistakably in your face you could easily lose an eye.
The museum's collection of roughly 200 pieces, which include frescoes, statues and amulets, plus votive (and explicit) fertility symbols, is kept in its own separate, linked rooms - the so-called Cabinet of Secrets (also known as the Forbidden Collection).
Admittedly, some of the pieces now classed as pornographic would have been used or on display every day. Items include oil lamps shaped like male genitalia, and wind chimes cast in bronze where the tiny bells hang off the erect phallus of a satyr. Phallic symbols at the time were considered to be good luck, or fertility charms and were no more sexualised than a horse shoe over a door.
Then there are other pieces, such as the famous frescoes from the Lupanare brothel (from lupa, meaning she-wolf, a colloquial Latin word for a prostitute), most of which are still in situ in the ruins of Pompeii, depicting a sexual menu of options for clients to choose from. But perhaps the collection's most famous item is the marble statue Pan and the Goat, which depicts the god Pan gazing almost lovingly into the eyes of the farmyard animal with which he is engaged in intimate congress.
So explicit is the detail of the statue that, when the piece was discovered in 1752 during excavations of the Villa of Papyrus in Herculaneum, the best known archaeologist of the period, the German Johann Winckelmann, was forbidden from seeing it.
In fact, for nearly 200 years the entire contents of the cabinet were considered so scandalous they were kept under lock and key.
An 1819 order by King Francis I of Naples called for them to be accessible only to people of "mature age and respected morals" and only with written permission from a government minister.
The secret cabinet was reopened, closed and reopened again depending on the morals of the time, until in 2000 it was permanently opened for public display (although children under 12 need written permission).
Unsurprisingly, since it reopened the collection has been a major drawcard for the museum.
But then, as Lucian Iacobelli, lecturer in Pompeiian antiquities at Bicocca University in Milan has said: "Sex, like death, is always of consuming human interest."
