Venetian: We all know that Italy was full of sex-monkeys during the Black Death, what with the whole we’re-going-to-die-anyway plunge into random fornication (Florence, anyone?). But Petrarch’s sonnets had already launched into eternity an unrequited, unconsummated, heart-sapping love for Laura, a woman he hadn’t met. The plague, of course, took her life. He moved to Venice for five years, later settling near Padua.
Excalibur: In looking beyond debates about whether King Arthur ever existed, you’ll have a clear view of the villainous ruler Maelgwn Gwynedd, who failed to redeem his sinful self after a stint in a monastery. He renounced his vows, moved from wife to wife (and lover to lover), finally chasing his nephew’s beautiful bride, and killing him to get to her.
Paris: Gertrude and Alice, Henry and June (also Henry and Anais) and other historical romances aside, nothing warms and breaks the heart quite like the legendary love of Abelard and Heloise, 12th-century scholars kept apart by Heloise’s uncle, secretly wed in Paris then tragically punished—she to a nunnery, he by castration.
Luxor: The Festival of Drunkenness in ancient Egypt famously encouraged excessive drinking and sexual promiscuity, but the Opet Festival was much more ceremoniously processional, celebrating the marriage (and reconsummation) of the god and goddess Amun and Mut, whose home was the city of Luxor.
Caesars Palace: Disgraced Roman emperor Tiberius Caesar was a fiendish weirdo if ever there was one, his “sex island” just the tip of the icing on a dirty iceberg cake, turning perversion on its head and making the bacchanalia references at Caesars a Hallmarkian stroll in the park.
