The city of Pompeii, along with Herculaneum and many smaller places around the Bay of Naples, were Roman municipalities destroyed during an eruption of the volcano Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. The eruption was described by Pliny the Younger, whose uncle Pliny the Elder died after making several trips across the bay with a flotilla of pleasure craft and fishing boats to save some of those trapped in seaside towns.

Ancient Pompeii was full of erotic or pornographic frescoes, symbols, inscriptions, and even household items. The ancient Roman culture of the time was much more sexually permissive than most present-day cultures and apparently had no concept of obscenity or that such art should be hidden from minors.

When the serious excavation of Pompeii began in the 18th century, a clash of the cultures was the result. A fresco on a wall that showed the ancient god of sex and fertility, Priapus with his extremely enlarged penis, was covered with plaster and only rediscovered because of rainfall in 1998.

In 1819, when king Francis I of Naples visited the exhibition at the National Museum with his wife and daughter, he was so embarrassed by the erotic artwork that he decided to have it locked away in a secret cabinet, accessible only to "people of mature age and respected morals." Re-opened, closed, re-opened again and then closed again for nearly 100 years, it was made briefly accessible again at the end of the 1960s (the time of the sexual revolution) and has finally been re-opened in the year 2000. Minors are not allowed entry to the once secret cabinet without a guardian or a written permission.