What are people doing behind those windows? I've always wanted to know. I looked at all those windows, I observed, from afar, I imagined .... But what are all those people doing? What do you do?
We were on the train and we were approaching Venice. After Mestre I start to feel a smell in the air .. A strong smell coming through the windows. It was hot and the windows were all open. I smell better and finally smell the sea. I start crying like a desperate one. All the people turn and they all look at me with concern. But it wasn’t desperation. They did not know that it had been three very long years that I had not seen and heard the sea. So smell that well known smell it was beautiful. And then once we got to Venice I was shocked by its beauty. The very fact of not having cars around was fantastic. Then as soon as I arrived, from a side street, in front of the colored marbles of San Marco I was moved again. Because those colors, those shapes, everything was like that
A sure way had to be found by which revolutionary ideas could circulate. Guys, erotic literature became the ideal answer! The authorities called them mauvais livres, while the printers and distributors passed them off as livres philosophiques; these were books without authorization to be printed, with licentious and sometimes obscene characters, a special vehicle for progressive and liberal ideologies. On the stalls of Paris, as well as in shop windows or in the deep pockets of gentlemen, novels, pamphlets and pamphlets with erotic or pornographic content began to appear, despite the relentless persecution of the police. This number of mauvais livres was truly immense. These books were produced in great secrecy, sometimes even across the border, so as not to be hunted down by the censors; in Switzerland there was, for example, the Société Tipographique de Neuchatel, active from 1769 to 1785, and circulated the pamphlets in France challenging the customs of Paris. In this regard, there were catalogs and archives of prohibited books confiscated by the police. The most famous texts are: ‘La Pucelle d’Orléans’ by Voltaire in 1777 ‘Thérese philosophe’ by Diderot, ‘Furor uterines de Marie-Antoinette’. Within the panorama of philosophical pornography, where political and religious defamation find a place, the two terms freedom and libertinism are connected in a completely original way.
THE PRODIGY OF IDEAS 