The Vatican’s Porn Palace: When Popes Commissioned Smut

🏛️ WTF Hall of Fame: The Vatican Once Had a Porn Palace (And No One Talks About It)

If you ever feel bad for your browser history, just remember: a future Pope once had one of the world’s most infamous erotic art collections — carved into the walls of a Vatican building. Yes, that Vatican.

Welcome to the Hall of Fame, Palazzo Borgia. Home of hypocrisy, horniness, and the wildest “do as I say, not as I do” moment in religious history.

🍷 The Original Sin? Nepotism and Nudes

Let’s set the scene. It’s the late 1400s. Rome is run like a mafia soap opera. Enter Pope Alexander VI — a.k.a. Rodrigo Borgia — who has more children than commandments he follows and uses his papacy like a personal power buffet.

He gives a palace to his son, Cesare Borgia (the inspiration for Machiavelli’s The Prince), who fills it with... wait for it...

Explicit erotic frescoes.
Biblical nudes.
Orgies.
Gods and goddesses doing things that would get you banned on Instagram.

And not in a “classical appreciation of the human form” kind of way.
We’re talking about literal porn in a building paid for by the Church.

🔥 Wait, So The Vatican Commissioned Smut?

Kind of. The artists were the same top-tier Renaissance talent working on sacred chapels by day... and then painting pagan sex scenes at night for the Borgias.

It’s like if the Pixar team moonlighted making adult films — in the same studio.

The walls of the palace became so infamous that for centuries, it was dubbed:

"The Vatican’s Porn Palace"
(Or, more politely, Palazzo dei Borgia.)

And just to twist the knife: Cardinals and future Popes walked past these murals daily.
No complaints. No excommunications. Just a silent agreement that this hallway doesn’t exist.

✝️ Preach Purity, Paint Porn

The sheer level of hypocrisy earns this a golden WTF. This was a time when the Church was:

• Condemning nudity

• Burning “heretical” books

• Banning sex outside marriage

• Preaching hellfire for even impure thoughts

Meanwhile, the Pope’s palace was a literal Renaissance red room.

And when the Reformation came knocking? You can bet Martin Luther had receipts.

🧹 So Where Is It Now?

Oh, the Vatican covered it up. Literally.

By the 1600s, most of the erotic murals were either painted over, removed, or hidden behind new walls.
But some of the originals? Still there. Still inside Vatican City. Still awkward.

Modern historians tiptoe around it, but the records are there. The receipts are real.
And guess what? The Vatican never officially denied it.

👑 Welcome to the Hall of Fame, Holy Hypocrisy

This is more than a bizarre footnote — it’s a full-blown WTF moment in history.

A Church that said lust is a sin built a palace that makes Game of Thrones look tame.

So next time someone tells you to “respect tradition,” ask them which one:
The sermons… or the sex murals?

WTFNow.uk — For when reality out-weirds fiction.