He went for nought for 92 off 10 overs, fourth on the all-time worst one-day bowling-figure list behind New Zealand's Martin Snedden, and Sri Lanka pair Ashantha De Mel and Sanath Jayasuriya.
The Western Province batsman played a tidy rather than spectacular innings - de Villiers the more attacking of the pair - but was seldom troubled en route to securing his seventh Test century.
The Dutch engraver Johann Theodore de Bry's "Gabonese King Receiving Europeans" (1599) depicts a pair of bemused, elaborately dressed European explorers, before the nude king and queen of Gabon and surrounded by their gesticulating subjects, also nude.
Italian newspaper reports suggested the pair were caught after they boasted about their exploits on a bus and that there was CCTV evidence from the Campo de' Fiori, outside the Drunken Ship bar.