Bologna - the rude bits

Janine gets some Culture in

As a tourist, my specialist areas of sightseeing are the Naughty and the Slightly Macabre. So for your delectation today I present a selection of intellectually improving boobies, bums and dangly bits from my weekend in Bologna. Click to enlarge, of course.

It's his hand

Actually this is one of Bolgna's famous landmarks, the statue of Neptune in the Piazza Nettuno. Made in 1567, apparently it annoyed the Catholic Church so much that for some years it had wear clothes. My guidebook also says that locals delight in pointing out this angle to photographic tourists. And yes, it's true - the woman who did our breakfasts in the hotel urged us to take this shameless smutpic!

These are the nereids at the base of the Neptune fountain. They represent the rivers Amazon, Danube, Nile and Ganges, I think. And they squirt water out of their tits. Cos that's classy.

 

"Camp? Moi?"

A rather sweet hermaphrodite from the archaeology museum.

This isn't sweet - it's just in very poor taste! From the medieval museum ... it wasn't labelled but we think it's an oil lamp. You can just imagine a university professor enjoying his reading by the light of someone's burning arse.

Topless martyrdom! She's smiling bravely through it all, though.

A detail from another painting in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, the main art gallery (which has the best medieval collection). There's actually a huge fresco in the San Petronio basilica in the same style and theme: the Devil devouring sinners on Judgement Day and shitting them out of his fiery bowels into Hell. Note the guy in the bishop's mitre directly below the Satanic Butt.
(The church fresco, btw, has an amusing and highly controversial extra detail which you can't actually get close enough to see clearly. Oh, you naughty Christians. Why can't you just play nice? *sniggers*)

Votive genitalia from the archeological museum. Either Etruscan or Roman, but the labelling wasn't in English and didn't give a date. Since these were made as thank-offerings, presumably the afflicted parts got better. Or bigger. Or whatever it was that the supplicants were praying for...

This is one of the wooden caryatids that holds up the canopy of the lecturer's podium in the old anatomy theatre. It depicts a flayed male corpse in remarkably ambulatory condition.

On second thoughts, maybe that belongs in Bologna - the grisly bits...