On leaving Genoa I repaired to Spezia, chiefly with a view of
accomplishing a sentimental pilgrimage, which I in fact achieved in the
most agreeable conditions. The Gulf of Spezia is now the headquarters
of the Italian fleet, and there were several big iron-plated frigates
riding at anchor in front of the town. The streets were filled with lads
in blue flannel, who were receiving instruction at a schoolship in the
harbour, and in the evening--there was a brilliant moon--the little
breakwater which stretched out into the Mediterranean offered a scene of
recreation to innumerable such persons. But this fact is from the point
of view of the cherisher of quaintness of little account, for since it
has become prosperous Spezia has grown ugly. The place is filled with
long, dull stretches of dead wall and great raw expanses of artificial
land. It wears that look of monstrous, of more than far-western newness
which distinguishes all the creations of the young Italian State. Nor
did I find any great compensation in an immense inn of recent birth,
an establishment seated on the edge of the sea in anticipation of a
_passeggiata_ which is to come that way some five years hence, the
region being in the meantime of the most primitive formation. The inn
was filled with grave English people who looked respectable and
bored, and there was of course a Church of England service in the
gaudily-frescoed parlour. Neither was it the drive to Porto Venere that
chiefly pleased me--a drive among vines and olives, over the hills
and beside the Mediterranean, to a queer little crumbling village on a
headland, as sweetly desolate and superannuated as the name it bears.
There is a ruined church near the village, which occupies the site
(according to tradition) of an ancient temple of Venus; and if Venus ever
revisits her desecrated shrines she must sometimes pause a moment in
that sunny stillness and listen to the murmur of the tideless sea at
the base of the narrow promontory. If Venus sometimes comes there Apollo
surely does as much; for close to the temple is a gateway surmounted by
an inscription in Italian and English, which admits you to a curious,
and it must be confessed rather cockneyfied, cave among the rocks. It
was here, says the inscription, that the great Byron, swimmer and poet,
“defied the waves of the Ligurian sea.” The fact is interesting, though
not supremely so; for Byron was always defying something, and if a slab
had been put up wherever this performance came off these commemorative
tablets would be in many parts of Europe as thick as milestones.
No; the great merit of Spezia, to my eye, is that I engaged a boat there
of a lovely October afternoon and had myself rowed across the gulf--it
took about an hour and a half--to the little bay of Lerici, which opens
out of it. This bay of Lerici is charming; the bosky grey-green hills
close it in, and on either side of the entrance, perched on a bold
headland, a wonderful old crumbling castle keeps ineffectual guard. The
place is classic to all English travellers, for in the middle of the
curving shore is the now desolate little villa in which Shelley spent
the last months of his short life. He was living at Lerici when he
started on that short southern cruise from which he never returned. The
house he occupied is strangely shabby and as sad as you may choose to
find it. It stands directly upon the beach, with scarred and battered
walls and a loggia of several arches opening to a little terrace with
a rugged parapet, which, when the wind blows, must be drenched with
the salt spray. The place is very lonely--all overwearied with sun and
breeze and brine--very close to nature, as it was Shelley’s passion
to be. I can fancy a great lyric poet sitting on the terrace of a warm
evening and feeling very far from England in the early years of the
century. In that place, and with his genius, he would as a matter of
course have heard in the voice of nature a sweetness which only the
lyric movement could translate. It is a place where an English-speaking
pilgrim himself may very honestly think thoughts and feel moved to lyric
utterance. But I must content myself with saying in halting prose that
I remember few episodes of Italian travel more sympathetic, as they have
it here, than that perfect autumn afternoon; the half-hour’s station on
the little battered terrace of the villa; the climb to the singularly
felicitous old castle that hangs above Lerici; the meditative lounge, in
the fading light, on the vine-decked platform that looked out toward the
sunset and the darkening mountains and, far below, upon the quiet sea,
beyond which the pale-faced tragic villa stared up at the brightening
moon.