In the autumn of 1897, after two years in jail on a charge of ‘gross indecency’, Oscar Wilde absconded to Italy with the deplorable Lord Alfred Douglas. Sodomy, whether with man or beast, carried a sentence of servitude for life in Victorian Britain: prigs protested that Wilde had got off lightly.
In Naples, ragamuffin capital of the Italian south, the Dublin-born outcast went to ground with Bosie in the Villa Guidice (now the Villa Bracale) at 37 Via Posillipo. Inevitably there was press intrusion. The English-language Naples Echo was quick to announce the arrival of Sebastian Melmouth: ‘Readers may know that this is the pseudonym of Oscar Wilde.’ Where to hide? To Wilde’s fury a journalist managed to inveigle his way into No 37:
Signor Wilde cast me a glacial interrogative gaze. He was a man of about forty, tall, of vigorous complexion, with clear English eyes. His splendid blond hair, brushed with care, fell about an elongated face (one of those equine faces so typical of the English). In one of the aesthete’s upper incisors a fragment of gold scintillated strangely when he spoke. He was wearing a suit of incomparably fine white English linen and a richly embroidered shirt with a vermillion cravat to match.
See Naples and dress up. A decade earlier, during his 1882 lecture tour of America, audiences had gone wild for Oscar, whose applications of rouge and dyed-green carnation buttonholes were so unlike anything worn by most cowboys. In his creatively depleted, corporeally bloated final years, however, his genius for self-promotion was of little use. Gossip-hungry Neapolitan reporters confused Bosie Douglas with Norman Douglas, the polymathic young English writer (and fellow lover of boys) who was resident nearby in Posillipo at the Villa Maya.
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