Byron and Shelley and Pisa

From "Tilt" a history of the Tower of Pisa:
Romanticism has been called, among other things, the
cult of the extinct,” and the romantics were never better
occupied than when scrambling about ancient ruins. The
remains of Rome, Greece, and Etruria evoked images of
some prelapsarian,'heroic age that the poets and artists
were eager to resurrect.* Granted, Pisa wasn’t Rome, but
there were ruins enough to help to conjure up the glorles
of the past and inspire sublime reverie. The monuments in
the Campo dei Miracoli were already centuries old and
thus sufficiently hoary to arouse the curiosity of the Pisa
Circle. Shelley, Leigh Hunt, and Lord Byron especially
were fond of visiting the Camposanto to examine
Oreagna’s Triumph of Death; they admired Nicola and Gio-
vanni Pisano’s pulpits in the baptistery and the duomo; and
they gazed in wonder at the tower, which, at latest count,
leaned twelve feet, six and a quarter inches askew. “Pisa
with its hanging tower and Sophia-like dome remind me,”
said Byron, “of an eastern place.” ,
The romantic vision of the Tower of Pisa couldn’t have
differed more profoundly from that of more scientifically
inclined men like Edward Cresy and George Taylor. If, as
one would suspect, the English architects had lamented the
campanile’s slanted state -in the name of the classical ideals
of order and symmetry, it was precisely the anomaly of the
tower’s tilt that the romantics embraced. That the cam-
panile was singular, wondrous, irregular, brimming with
pathos, and suggestive of “an eastern place” was, to the
romantic sensibility, at least, cause for admiration and cele-
bration. Indeed, one of romanticism’s greatest contribu-
tions to aesthetics was its ethos that discovered beauty in
unconventional places like a storm-tossed sea, a desolate
heath, a ruin, or a crooked tower.
For all of their impact, however,_the romantics’ stay in
Pisa was actually quite short. On Iuly 8, I822, Percy Bysshe
Shelley and Edward Williams boarded the less-than-
seaworthy Don ]uan and set sail across the Gulf of Spezia.
Edward Trelawny was there to see them off, along with a
Genoese sailor who, as the boat slipped away, is said to
have commented, “Look at those black lines and the dirty
rags hanging on them out of the sky——they are a warning;
look at the smoke on the water; the devil is brewing mis-
chief.” They were the last ones to see Shelley and Williams
alive. The poet’s body was washed ashore ten days later,
Williams’s soon followed. In a highly charged rite that no
doubt would have pleased the poet, Lord Byron had the
bodies cremated on the beach at Viareggio, north of Pisa.
“We have been burning the bodies of Shelley and Williams
on the seashore,” he wrote to Margaret Iane King Moore,
another member of the Pisa Circle. “You can have no idea
what an extraordinary effect‘ such a funeral pile has, on a
desolate shore, with mountains in the background and the
sea before, and the singular appearance the salt and frank-
incense gave to the flame.”
Not surprisingly, the Pisa Circle soon broke up. Byron,
Teresa Gamba, Mary Shelley, and Leigh Hunt and his
family all moved on to Genoa, while _Pisa reverted to its
somnolent self. The legacy of the romantics, however, lin-
gered on, and not just in the works composed by the
Circle while there. Thanks in large part to these works_—
including much of Byron’s Don ]uan (cantos six through
ten, at least); “Adonais,” Percy Shelley’s elegy on the death
of Keats; and Mary Shelley’s novel Valperga: Or t/are Lzfe
and Adventures of Castruccio, Prince of Lucca-and the
posthumous fame of both Shelley and Byron (the latter
died just two years after Shelley, fighting for Greek inde-
pendence from the Ottoman empire), Pisa became a de
rigueur stop on a romantic pilgrimage trail. Soon a steady
stream of travelers, poets, students, and nonconformists of
every stripe turned up to pay homage at the haunts where
the Pisa Circle had lived and played in their Paradise of
Exiles. One such pilgrim-traveler was the French poet and _
novelist Louise Colet, whose diary of her stay at Pisa pro- -
vides an intimate glimpse of life in the town in the mid-
nineteenth-century. A passage on her visit to the Tower of
Pisa is particularly revealing, saying much about the evo-
lution of the tower and the shifting sentiments of
observers toward it:
I was anxious to climb this famous leaning tower’
that now stoodbefore me, graceful and weightless, '
standing out against the blue sky with its; eight cylin-
drical galleries of columns; but when I wanted them
to open the door to let me up, difficulties began. No
less than three people at a time are allowed up, I’m
told, since two travellers (likely lovers) jumped over
the rail at the top of the tower tocommit suicide.
I call to my cab-driver and look for a third person _
in the deserted square, but to no avail. While I
debate with the intransigent keeper, a cab arrives
delivering a visitor; the man joins us, and at ‘length
we are allowed up. The tower is 184 ft. tall, and
completely sheathed in marble; the foot slips on the
smooth stone; giddiness overcomes one as you
progress between these open galleries and the eye is
dazzled by the intensity of the light on a summer
day, embracing the vast horizon that stretches out all
around; the body, as if attracted towards the
precipice, staggers through the space between the
columns; I am compelled to lean on the arm‘ of my
accidental companion. i
Once on the platform, an incommensurable
expanse is revealed to our eyes; the blue sea merges
with the sky to the south-west, and in this twofold.
blue the little islands ’ of Gorgona and Caprara v
emerge; further away, the uncertain lines of Corsica
and Elba can be made out; on a closer plane, Liv'orno ~
stands out right by the edge of the waves; following
the coastline you can see the spot where Byron
burned Shelley’s body on the funeral pyre. . . .
I descend reluctantly, despite the queasiness
which the seeming oscillation of the monument pro-
vokes in me. The tower feels unsteady to me, as if it
would drag us along in its fall. It is a known fact that
stretching a rope from its summit to the ground, on
the leaning side, the topwill extend over the base by
over 9 ft. This inclination was used by Galileo in his
experiments on the falling of heavy bodies.
There is a good deal to glean from Colet’s account. On a
tragic note, it seems that travelers (lovers?) were already
turning to the Tower of Pisa asa suitably dramatic setting
from which to leap to their deaths (a sadly persistent tradi-
tion). They were overcome, one presumes, with Zc mal du
siécle, that wholly romantic malady consisting of more or
less equal doses of the jadedness of Byron’s Childe Harold,
the revulsion of Chateaubriand’s René, and the u/eltsc/zmerz
of Goethe’s Werther. As could well be expected in such cir-
cumstances, the Pisan authorities were obliged to restrict
access to the campanile (although it is hard to understand
how the measure of allowing no less than three visitors at a
time would. help to prevent suicides).
*In this regard it is interesting to note that in his memorial portrait of
Percy Bysshe Shelley, the painter Joseph Severn tellingly set the Poet in
a landscape replete with ruins. The canvas, entitled Shelley Composzng
“Prometheus Unbound" in the Baths of Caracalla, shows a surprisingly
boyish rebelpoet drawing inspiration from the Roman ruins f0f 1115
dramatic poem on Prometheus’s own revolt against the gods