Italy’s restoration of a Roman mosaic featuring a pair of well-endowed ‘lucky testicles’ has sent the usual waves of tittering through the popular press. But for those of us who prefer our history with a side of vinegar, the real joke is how this Italian treasure puts Britain’s own heritage protection to shame. While Her Majesty’s Government dithers over crumbling country houses and Roman ruins left to the elements, the Italians treat a phallus-bearing pavement like a national heirloom.
It is a tale of two cultures: one that reveres its past, however bawdy, and one that lets its heritage rot while prattling on about ‘levelling up’. The mosaic, uncovered in the 1950s at the ‘House of the Dolphin’ in Pompeii, was recently restored to its full glory. A cluster of testicles, believed to bring good fortune, now gleams under museum lights.
And rightly so. The Romans understood that history is not just about marble statues and noble speeches; it is also about the crude, the earthy, the utterly human. They preserved their graffiti, their brothels, their lucky charms.
We, by contrast, have a Heritage Lottery Fund that spends millions on a community centre and leaves a 12th-century priory to collapse into a mud heap. Consider the contrast. Italy’s cultural budget is hardly generous, yet they find the means to restore a mosaic some might dismiss as a vulgarity.
Why? Because they know that history is a continuum: you cannot pick and choose the noble bits and ignore the rest. Britain, meanwhile, has a heritage protection system that is ‘advisory’ at best.
A developer wants to bulldoze a medieval barn? A public inquiry. A Roman villa sinks into a soggy field?
Too bad. We have become a nation of heritage tourists, not heritage custodians. We flock to the Colosseum and the Uffizi, but we let our own Hadrian’s Wall crumble underfoot.
The Italians are not perfect. Their bureaucracy is a labyrinth, their funding sporadic. But they possess something we have lost: a sense that the past is alive, that it demands attention, even the parts that make you blush.
Britain’s heritage sector is riddled with apathy and underfunding, yet we pride ourselves on our ‘historical consciousness’. It is a lie. We are too busy arguing about statues to notice the roofs caving in.
So let the tabloids chuckle at the ‘lucky testicles’. I am not laughing. I am thinking of the thousands of unprotected sites in Britain that will never see a restoration team.
I am thinking of the Saxon crosses left to weather, the Roman forts stripped by treasure hunters. And I am asking: what does it say about a nation that cannot even preserve its own patrimonio, while a country known for political chaos can rescue a mosaic of a phallus? The answer is discomforting.
It suggests that our much-vaunted ‘respect for tradition’ is hollow. We have the museums, the academics, the heritage professionals. But we lack the will.
Italy has the will, born out of a conviction that every stone, every crudely carved testicle, is part of a story worth telling. Britain could learn something from Rome’s lucky charm. It might not save our heritage, but it might remind us what we are losing.
