The Cenci

Abstract

By the summer of 1819 the round of sightseeing was over. In Shelley’s three remaining years of life the ferment of continual travel is stilled at last. Apart from a brief visit to Ravenna, he kept within a radius of fifty miles from Pisa, living at Leghorn, Florence, Pisa itself and Lerici. Shelley and Mary had intended to leave Rome in the summer of 1819, because Mary was expecting a baby in the autumn and they knew of only one good doctor, who would then be at Florence. William’s death hastened their departure to Tuscany, and in mid-June they moved to Leghorn, where they rented a pleasant house a little way out of the town, the Villa Valsovano. At the top of the house Shelley found an ideal study, very small and more a glass-covered terrace than a room. The confined space became unbearably hot to all but Shelley, who with his ‘salamander’s temperament’¹ basked happily in the sun. As Browning noted long ago, he was a ‘sun-treader’, often in his poems equating heat with pleasure, and ice with pain.

In cancred malice and revengefull spight.

Spenser, Faerie Queene