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In the 19th Century, the Mediterranean was a playground for English poets and
other northern Europeans of romantic temperament. British writing of that period frequently mentioned
a mysterious port, Leghorn, which is difficult to find on today's nautical charts.
Leghorn, it turns out, is simply an odd and dated anglicization of Livorno.
Who would have thought to consult a Mediterranean chart for a port named Leghorn?
The poets, Byron and Shelley, lived for a time in Leghorn where Shelley, aged thirty, met his
appropriately poetic fate on July 8, 1822. Rumors abound. Some perhaps are true.
Shelley sailed from Leghorn on his thirty-foot ketch, Ariel, to return to
his home in the Bay of Lerici. Sailing with him were his friend Edward Williams and a sailor
who was either Italian or English or perhaps some other nationality. Shelley had never learned
to swim despite his fondness for sailing. The Ariel went down, either the victim of a
sudden squall or Italian pirates in a felucca. (Given that squalls are not typical of the
Mediterranean in July and that the United States Marines were fighting pirates in Tripoli as
late as 1805, the felucca legend is not so far-fetched as it seems on first hearing.)
The bodies washed ashore near Via Reggio on July 18 where they were discovered by fishermen.
After ten days in the sea, the bodies were unrecognizable, but Shelley's friend, Edward Trelawny,
found a volume of Sophocles and a volume of Keats' latest poems, Lamia and Isabella and The Eve of Saint
Agnes, in the coat pockets of one of the bodies and identified Shelley.
Days later, Trelawny organized a cremation of the bodies on the beach with Byron, soldiers and
villagers in attendance. During the cremation of Shelley's body, Trelawny took the heart from the
fire because it would not burn, and he smashed Shelley's skull, fearing that Byron would salvage it
for a drinking cup. While waiting for the pyre to consume Shelley's remains, the easily bored
Byron may or may not have swum out to his boat, Bolivar, and back.
Trelawny took the heart to Mary Shelley who was either so horrified that she could not accept it
or so moved that she carried it with her in a silken shroud everywhere she went for the rest of
her life.
Shelley’s ashes were buried in a Protestant cemetery in Rome where his son William was buried.
Keats is interred in the same cemetery.
Regarding the skull, Trelawny may have remembered Byron's sly poem, Lines Inscribed Upon a Cup
Formed from a Skull, excerpted here:
Start not - nor deem my spirit fled;
In me behold the only skull,
For which, unlike a living head,
Whatever flows is never dull....
Where once my wit, perchance, hath shone,
In aid of others' let me shine;
And when, alas! our brains are gone,
What nobler substitute than wine?
George Gordon, Lord Byron, 1808
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