Naples, a little too scary and real for North American college kids, ­wasn’t a popular stop. I’d overheard the backpackers at Fawlty Towers regaling one another with stories of pickpockets and muggings. It was true: in Naples, you had to be on your toes, if only to avoid the helmetless 12-­year-­olds riding three-­to-­a-­Vespa. Shelley witnessed a murder within minutes of his arrival, and one Grand Tourist reported seeing a street urchin steal a handkerchief from an English dandy at one end of the Largo di Castello and peddle it back to him at the other. Even today, Naples, with its genially shambolic street life, had something of Bombay to it. Patrick, a hostel guest from Limerick, told me about being offered a cut-­rate carton of Marlboros in the market.

“Jesus,” he marvelled, “the fellow was completely mesmerizing. I ­couldn’t take me eyes off him.”

The salesman took Patrick’s money, handed him a well-­wrapped Marlboro carton, and melted into the crowd. When Patrick tried to check his purchase, an accomplice appeared, ripped open the packaging, and showed him the cigarette packs were filled with nails.

“Then he panicked, as if the carabinieri were coming, and ran off with me bloody nails!” he said. “It was worth it, though, just to see the sheer artistry of those fellows.”

At the desk, Diane, from Seattle, also cautioned me about scam artists.

“If you get offered a digital camera for like a hundred bucks in the market, ­don’t buy it. You’ll just open the box and find a block of wood or a bag of sand inside. It happens a couple of times a month to guests here. This is a good place to pick up counterfeit Gucci, though.” (Later, one of my banknotes was pushed back to me at the rail station window. It was a colour-­photocopied counterfeit. Naples — a town so crooked that even the bank machines rip you off.)

Over the next few days I got to like Diane, a pretty woman in her mid-­20s, with big dark eyes that betrayed her Cuban-­American roots and tight dreadlocks that spoke of her involvement with Seattle’s anti-­globalization scene. She’d been travelling for four months, mostly in Spain, and was looking for a change in her life. Over a glass of wine in the kitchen one night, she told me about her courtship of the Italian boys.

“When I arrived, I saw all those hotties on their scooters, with their sleeveless shirts, and I was like — mmmm, I gotta get me one of those.” She gave her phone number to the guy who delivered the laundry, but he stood her up. “So, forget it, buster, I said. You know, these Italians are all spoiled by their mamas. They live at home, they’ve got a regular girlfriend they know they’re going to marry. Until then, it’s like: ‘What can I get today?’”

Lately, she’d been hanging around the Piazza Gesù Nuovo, trying to score hash from the anarchist squatters, and she had high hopes for a guy from the local communist centre. She reminded me of myself when I’d been rattling around Germany and France in my 20s: a little lost, looking for something new — preferably a genuine relationship with a European, not a drunken one-­night stand with another backpacker.

I’d come to Naples with a particular goal: the Secret Cabinet, a collection of erotic art in the National Archeological Museum that had been a required stop on the classic Grand Tour. For much of its existence the Gabinetto degli oggetti osceni could be visited only with a permit, and had actually been walled up by the Bourbons in 1851. Recently reopened after a complete reorganization, the collection was still kept behind a metal gate, and while our group waited to enter, I studied the petitions of English dignitaries asking the Bourbon kings for admittance. “The foreigners visiting Naples on the Grand Tour tended to indulge in ribaldry whenever the collection was mentioned,” a sheet in a display case noted dryly, “and their comments could be decidedly defamatory with respect to life and morals, both ancient and modern, in the Kingdom of Naples.”

A pretty young woman in a red top led us into the first of the Cabinet’s five small rooms.

“Welcome to the Gabinetto Segreto, a collection of objects that were considered unmoral in their day. As you can see,” she said, pointing to a cabinet of objects from the Borgia collection, “they are all in the shapes of virile members, uteruses, and breasts.”

“Careful where you sit down, luv,” an Englishman whispered to his girlfriend.

How the Tourist toffs must have tittered when they’d finally gained admittance. Many of the objects had been recovered from Pompeii and Herculaneum. Bakeries were advertised with images of erect stone phalluses — an allusion to rising bread — and bronze bells made up of clusters of penises had hung outside middle-­class houses.

“These are pygmies, in a Nile scene,” said the guide, gesturing towards a narrow fresco of naked, childlike figures from the House of the Doctor in Pompeii. “They were considered a very lascivious people, very close to nature, and were usually depicted with very large phalluses. Here you can see them involved in some very strange performances.”

“Gives me some good ideas for my next trip to Egypt, that does,” said the Englishman, sotto voce.

There were Kama Sutra — like frescoes from brothels, a marble of Pan sodomizing a goat, and a Venus in a bikini leaning on a tiny figure with a huge erection. (Or it would have been huge, if some Vatican censor ­hadn’t snapped it off.) I was particularly taken by the Freudian symbolism of a bronze gladiator duelling with his own penis, which was turning on him like a wild beast. The Gabinetto Segreto must have been the 800-­metre bungee jump of the 18th-­century Grand Tour, providing Tourists with a new perspective on their long and dull Latin studies and fodder for dinner conversation for the rest of their lives.