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Pietro Boselli – Spornosexual Philosopher

Mark Simpson sits at the feet of ‘The Bona from Verona’

Pietro Boselli, the ‘world’s sexiest maths teacher’ as he has been breathlessly dubbed by the press, is living, geometrically consistent proof that spornosexuals don’t have to be dumb. And also, that for all their self-sexualisation, spornos can be romantico. Angelic, even.

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Though if angels look like this who needs Hell?

Hailing from Verona, Italy, with his cherubic facial features, those bucolic, rosy cheeks that belies his 27 years, and that smiley submissiveness, Boselli puts me in mind somewhat of Antinous, the beautiful young male lover of the Roman Emperor Hadrian. After Antinous’ early death aged 20 years in 130 AD, a grieving Hadrian made him a deity, and his image was reproduced in countless statues and worshipped in both the Latin West and the Greek East.

Nowadays we can’t be waiting around until someone dies to turn them into a god. While smartphones and social media mean we don’t have to turn them into marble statues to reproduce – and worship – their image. The divine Boselli is of course all over YouTube and Instagram.

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But beneath that angelic face he has that devilish body, which is rather more buff than most depictions of Antinous. The boyish face and the smoothly mannish body are slightly reminiscent of the young Marky Mark in Mr Klein’s underpants, sans the bad boy rapismo. Boselli is a very good boy on the streets – but we like to think, a very naughty one between the sheets. The bona from Verona.

As a reminder that we’re talking about second generation male tartiness here, Boselli was just four years old when Wahlberg was grabbing himself on the side of buses.

Boselli is not a maths teacher anymore, but a full-time fitness model. And like any pro sporno he has his own YouTube channel, where we can dissect his beautiful body. Either to try and copy it, or to somehow penetrate its secrets.

In truth, he was never really a maths teacher in the way that most people understand or remember a maths teacher, though it is a great marketing moniker. While studying for his mechanical engineering PhD at London University he taught undergraduate mathematics to some lucky engineering students for a while. One of whom, according to Wikipedia, ‘took note of his physique and stumbled on his modelling career’.

Stumbled. Hmmm. I suppose you could ‘stumble’ while hyperventilating and rushing to Google someone’s name + ‘NAKED’.

Boselli was in fact a model long before he became an engineer: he landed the Armani Junior campaign in 1995 – aged just seven – and carried it for four years. But there is no question that he is a highly intelligent and highly educated young man. That he is not ‘just’ a pretty face attached to some pretty pecs.

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However, the ‘world’s sexiest maths teacher’ moniker ensured he became even more famous than he would have done if he had just been a pretty face.

It’s interesting how we – by which I mean ‘I’ – still seem to have this difficulty reconciling beauty with intelligence, regardless of whether the ‘object’ of our desire is male or female. Perhaps it’s a form of Freud’s observation that men frequently separate affection and desire, tending to debase those they desire.

Pietro is confusing-intoxicating phenomenon to behold not just because of his near-androgyny  – as Susan Sontag said all truly beautiful things are a mixture of masculine and feminine – but because we don’t know whether to put him on a pedestal or in a sling.

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The Ancients saw beauty and virtue as being related: Antinous was likely intelligent and well-educated and Hadrian would have expected nothing less. But Christian dualism put paid to that. Crudely, in the Christian worldview the body is the world, thus corruption and sin, and belongs to the devil – while our minds/souls are non-material, eternal and belong to God.

And bodies that provoke lust – such as Boselli’s – are doubly damned.

Tasty Pietro Boselli
Tasty Pietro Boselli

Boselli’s TED talk earlier this year played on the cultural contradiction he represents, and was titled: ‘How I survived as professor on the runway and model in the classroom‘. And truth be told, he does look like a model on the runway talking like a professor. There seemed to be a lot of telephoto lens action from the audience, who may not have been entirely focused on his message.

His adorable accent and equally adorable nervousness do definitely add to his many other distractions.

As far as I can remember (my mind did wander) he was talking about the mind/body dualism of our culture and why it should be disregarded. It’s a message he seems to touch on again in this, the first of his new YouTube ‘Workout Philosophy’ talks. Cartesian dualism be damned!

That said, most people watching the video above will see, in their mind’s eye, the video below. Even when he keeps his t-shirt on it looks like it is taking itself off.

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2 thoughts on “Pietro Boselli – Spornosexual Philosopher”

  1. I think he’s great too, Mark. The nervousness that you mention makes him appear somehow more downt to earth and not so wrapped up in himself. Watch the first few videos on his Youtube channel and you’ll see that he doesn’t really get why anybody would be interested in his life, but somebody had told him to do it, so he did. Anyway, he makes me tingle.

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