.jpg)
In spring 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley moved to Italy with his young wife Mary. Mary had just published the Gothic novel Frankenstein. They were accompanied by Mary’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont , the mother of Byron’s daughter Allegra, following a brief liaison with the poet .
The Shelleys settled to Palazzo Marin in Florence in October 1819,
Their son, Percy Florence, was born there in November 1819.
The building was destroyed in the Second World War.
In January 1820, the Shelleys moved to Pisa, where the poet found a source of inspiration for its poem Tower of Famine. In this tower , described in Dante’s Inferno, Ugolino della Gherardesca was locked up in the tower, along with his sons and grandsons, and left to starve to death.
Percy Bysshe Shelley died on 8 July 1822 In a mysterious and tragic accident, he drowned off the coast of Livorno , when his boat, the Don Juan, sank because a violent storm. The fish-eaten corpse was later identified by the copy of Endymion , a Keats’s poetry, found in his pocket.
Lord Byron and Leigh Hunt ceremoniously cremated Shelley’s body ,doused in wine, on the beach of Viareggio. Hunt allegedly reached into the burning pit and took out his heart for Mary, who carried it in a silk shroud wherever she went. The rest of Shelley’s remains were buried alongside Keats in Rome.
The last Shelley’s home in Italy is in the bay of Lerici, not far from Pisa, there is a plaque in Italian which reads: “Upon this terrace, once protected by the shadow of an ancient oak-tree, Mary Shelley and Jane Williams awaited with weeping anxiety the return of Percy Shelley who, sailing from Livorno in his fragile craft, had come to shore by sudden chance among the silences of the Elysian Isles – O blessed shores, where Love, Liberty and Dreams have no chains.”