Lord Byron museum to open in Italian building
where poet had intense affair
Visitors will be able to explore Palazzo Guiccioli in
Ravenna, where Byron romanced its aristocrat owner’s wife
Angela Giuffrida in Rome
Mon 25 Nov 2024 06.06 GMT
A museum dedicated to the flamboyant British poet and
satirist Lord Byron is due to open in the northern Italian city of Ravenna,
housed in the same building where he pursued an intense affair with the wife of
an aristocrat and completed some of his most famous works.
Byron unabashedly moved in 1819 into Palazzo
Guiccioli, owned by the husband of Countess Teresa Guiccioli, whom he met at a
party in Venice.
The sprawling residence in the heart of the city has
been restored by the Cassa di Risparmio di Ravenna Foundation and from 29
November visitors will be able to wander through the rooms where the romance
took place and where he knuckled down to complete masterpieces including Don
Juan, Sardanapalus, The Prophecy of Dante and the final canto of Childe
Harold’s Pilgrimage.
One of the rooms contains tokens of love kept by the
countess, including letters, jewellery, locks of the poet’s curly hair and
shards of his sunburned skin.
The museum will partly be dedicated to the
Risorgimento, the 19th-century Italian movement for unification, owing to
Byron’s connections to figures involved with the Carbonari, an informal network
of secret revolutionary societies that played a role in the unification
process.
“The idea is to link three aspects of who Lord Byron
was – the poet, the lover, and the person oriented towards freedom,” said Fabio
Ricci, a press spokesperson for the museum.
Byron died in 1824 in what is now Greece. He had
several affairs during his life but the countess was his final great love.
“The love for Teresa led Byron to transform himself
and, without becoming a saint, he changed his life,” said Antonio Patuelli, the
president of the foundation.
Visitors to the museum, which the foundation said was
the only one in the world specifically dedicated to Byron, will also be able to
relive the poet’s experiences in Italy and learn what it was about the country
that inspired him, thanks to interactive virtual reality technology.
Byron fled England for mainland Europe in 1816,
leaving behind a trail of scandalous affairs and debt, never to return. He
travelled to Belgium and Switzerland, as well as Venice and Rome, before
returning to Venice in 1819, where he met the countess. It was love at first
sight, and the pair had contemplated eloping before settling in her marital
home. He then followed her to Pisa in 1821.
During his time in Ravenna, Byron received visits from
his friends, Percy Bysshe Shelley, also considered one of the major English
Romantic poets, and the Irish writer and poet Thomas Moore.
Byron was described by the writer Caroline Lamb, with
whom he also had an affair, as “mad, bad, and dangerous to know”. He was known
by people in Ravenna as “the crazy Englishman”.
In 1823, he left Italy for Greece, where he joined
insurgents fighting the war of independence against the Ottoman empire. He died
of a fever in Missolonghi in April 1824, aged 36, and is buried at his family
vault in Nottinghamshire.
Teresa,
Contessa Guiccioli
Teresa, Contessa Guiccioli (1800–1873) was an Italian
noblewoman and the married lover[2] of Lord Byron while he was living in
Ravenna and writing the first five cantos of Don Juan.[3] She wrote the
biographical account Lord Byron's Life in Italy.
On 19 January 1818, Teresa married an elderly diplomat,
Count Alessandro Guiccioli, who was 50 years her senior. It was three days
later, on 22 January, that she met Lord Byron at the home of Countess Albrizzi.
Count Guiccioli was a nobleman who had ingratiated himself with Napoleon during
his campaign in Italy in 1796, and during the French rule of Italy during the
Napoleonic era, Count Guiccioli held a series of high offices, making him one
of the most powerful men in Italy. There is no evidence that Teresa, his third
wife, ever felt any affection for him.
Byron's relationship with Teresa was a dangerous one as
Count Guiccioli was still a powerful man who was widely believed to have been
behind the murder in 1816 of another nobleman who was suing him for having
seized his lands under Napoleon. In a letter to her sent on 22 April 1819
written in Italian, Byron wrote "you sometimes tell me I have been your
first real love-and I assure that you shall be my last Passion". In a
letter, Byron wrote that she mailed him some of her pubic hair, which was a
traditional Italian gesture that indicated her willingness to begin an affair.
The Countess Guiccioli lived with Byron as his common-law wife first in Ravenna
and then in Genoa until 1823.
Her father, Count Ruggiero Gamba was an Italian nationalist
who wanted to unify all of the Italian states into one, a project that would
also mean the Austrian Empire, which ruled much of what is now northern Italy
would also lose much territory. Under Teresa's influence, Byron joined a secret
pseudo-Masonic society dedicated to Italian unity and driving out the Austrians
that had already been joined by her father and brother. For plotting against the Austrian
Empire, Count Gamba was exiled to the countryside of the Romagna region. In
1823, the Austrian authorities allowed Count Gamba to leave his exile in the
Romagna with the condition that the Countess Guiccioli had to end her
relationship with Byron and return to her husband. The news that the Countess
Guiccioli was leaving him helped precipitate Byron's decision to go fight on
the Greek side in the Greek war of independence. When Byron boarded the
Hercules, the ship that was to take him from Genoa to Greece, it caused
"passionate grief" from Guiccioli who broke down in tears as she said
farewell to her lover. Going along with Byron to Greece was her brother, Pietro
Gamba, who was to serve as Byron's bumbling right-hand man.
Later in life, she married the Marquis de Boissy who, even
after their marriage, boasted of her liaison with Byron, introducing her as
"Madame la Marquise de Boissy, autrefois la Maitresse de Milord
Byron" (the Marquise de Boissy, formerly the mistress of Lord Byron).
Alexandre Dumas included her as a minor character in his
novel The Count of Monte Cristo using the disguised name "Countess
G-".Lord Byron also used this shortened name in his journals.[15] At a
party in Paris hosted by Napoleon III in the 1860s, the wife of the American
ambassador introduced a wealthy American tourist, Mrs. Mary R. Darby, to the
now elderly Contessa Guiccioli, saying she was one of the last people alive who
knew Byron personally. Mrs. Darby introduced herself by saying that she had
heard Byron was "king of poets", only for Guiccioli, who was still in
love with him, to say that Byron was the "king of men". Mrs. Darby befriended Guiccioli who
showed her two manuscripts that she had written in French, recalling her youth
with Byron. Mrs. Darby, who quickly became Guiccioli's best friend, worked with
her on turning the manuscripts into books, only one of which has survived. When the Contessa Guiccioli died in
1873 with no children, her papers were inherited by her grand-nephew, Count
Carlo Gamba, who hid them away in his family's archives, believing that his
grand-aunt's scandalous relationship with Byron would damage the reputation of
the Gamba family. Not until 2005 were one of the books the Contessa Guiccioli
wrote about her relationship with Byron published.
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