We enjoyed a trip through the sites and statues of ancient Europe, all in one giant bath complex! If you can get over the fear of being naked, it’s pretty nice.

— anonymous TripAdvisor review

Pass through the automatic doors
        and the motion-activated water
jets to a life-size Trevi fountain
        bathed in the blue light the dome

above casts down. But rather than
        throwing a coin to ensure your
return to the Eternal City,
        toss yourself into the pool

of hot water to temporarily
        cleanse yourself of whatever
circumstances brought you here. Date.
        Divorce. Last-ditch attempt

to rekindle a passionate love
        of the Self. Next to the milk bath,
enter the Blue Grotto for a glimpse
        of an airbrushed Tyrrhenian Sea

engulfed in manufactured mist—
        for what is the Real if not
a parlour trick performed by upper
        management? And like Sontag’s sense

of camp, everything here has
        quotation marks around it.
After a brief stop in a bath
        with “Spain’s” plastic bullfighter,

settle beneath four caryatids
        carrying a “Greece” still under
construction (where actual men
        stroke each other off while trying

to avoid the security camera’s
        Cyclopic eye). Tropical fish float
stoically in a murky aquarium
        mimicking our own predicaments

and predilections. And for reasons
        having more to do with space
than time, Michelangelo’s Mary
        emerges from the wall, stripped

of her slain son. Unblinking, she
        stares at us in our mandatory
nakedness with our faults on full
        display—from the way middle age

puts its fingers on the scale
        of the testicles’ balancing act
to stomachs spirited away
        from the unrelenting gaze

of mirrors that want us to see
        we’re not the younger versions
of ourselves we imagine ourselves
        to be. Tangled triangles of pubic

hair float on bodies disembodied
        from themselves sitting in the Salt
Sauna where we rub our skin with
        a purifying grit until the steam

dissolves everything into a cloud
        of visible invisibility and I’m
free to return to the changeroom
        where my valuables are kept

in a locker under lock and key
        for the price of a single coin
that’s returned, spent but somehow
        still the same as when I arrived.

Nathan Mader is the author of the poetry collection The Endless Animal (fineperiodpress, 2024), which was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. His poems have appeared in Plenitude, The Fiddlehead, Kyoto Journal and elsewhere, including The Best Canadian Poetry (Biblioasis). Originally from Saskatchewan in Canada, he currently lives in Kyoto, Japan.

Image credit: Photo-illustration produced by Rick Elizaga using material generated by Firefly Image 5 and Gemini 3 AI models.