ABSTRACT
Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries homosexual men from many countries travelled to the Mediterranean, following in the footsteps of Winckelmann and Platen, Byron and Symonds. They came for classical ruins and Renaissance art, for sun and sea and for the youths whom they could seduce with love or money. The writers or artists among them often brought homoerotic themes of the Mediterranean to their work. Sometimes they framed whole stories, novels or poems around the lure of the Mediterranean, punctuated with references to the flora and fauna of the South and allusions to the lives and loves of the ancients. For others, the Mediterranean was only a setting.
