In his 1994 analysis of gay New York, George S. Chauncey identifies two orthodoxies impeding our understanding of the history of modern male homosexuality. The “old dogma” claims that modern male homosexual culture was invented exclusively by financially secure cosmopolitan bourgeois white Victorian gentlemen (10), including Oscar Wilde, Marcel Proust, and André Gide. The “new dogma” asserts that the modern homosexual was invented in the pages of trans-European sexological journals (10) by such men as Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Edward Carpenter, and Magnus Hirschfeld. Largely erasing the historical participation of white working-class and Black, brown, and Asian men, some also working-class, in the invention of modern male homosexuality, these dogmas find their chief condition of possibility in Michel Foucault’s infamous distinction between the sodomite and the homosexual (History 43). The Italian Vice reinvigorates historical memory of the participation of Italian working-class men in the invention of modern male homosexuality. Its point of departure is the queer sex tourism industry that flourished in Italy between the tail end of the Grand Tour and the mid-Fascist years. What were the characteristics and contours of this sex tourism industry? How was it understood by Italians themselves? What were the “indigenous” Italian queer lifeworlds into which it was folded? Finally, how does a focus on Italy transform our collective understanding? The Italian Vice concludes that a failure to attend to Italy has seriously compromised Anglophone queer studies’ shared apprehension of the history of modern male homosexuality.