by John Keahey
The account of this event, by Shelley’s close friend Edward John Trelawny, is deliciously compelling, but I suspect it’s rare for a twenty-first-century visitor to know about it. To his credit, Ernest Hemingway made a brief reference to the drowning in his 1927 short story “Che Ti Dice la Patria?” (“What Does the Fatherland Tell You?”). His unnamed character makes an offhand remark to a traveling companion, named Guy, as they sit in a tiny restaurant near the Ligurian town of La Spezia, several miles to the north of Tuscany’s Viareggio: “They drowned Shelley somewhere along here.” “‘That was down by Viareggio,’ Guy said.” The two comments had nothing whatsoever to do with Hemingway’s story. Perhaps the then-youthful author dropped it in just to impress readers with his literary acuity.
On July 8, 1822, Shelley and his close friends Edward Williams and Charles Vivian had left Livorno, a coastal city the British in the distant past had inexplicably renamed “Leghorn,” located just south of Pisa. They were en route north to Lerici, a delightful Ligurian village on the Gulf of La Spezia. Shelley and Williams, with their wives, shared a home there, the Villa Magni. Shelley and Vivian were incompetent sailors, and while Williams had experience sailing, he apparently was not skilled enough to avert disaster. The Don Juan also was later said to be poorly designed and unsafe.
The trio, with the wives waiting at Lerici, departed Livorno during squally weather and against the advice of Trelawny and Lord Byron, who were staying in Pisa. A sudden storm came up after they had passed the mouth of the Arno River and were halfway home. The schooner apparently was swamped and sank. It was an ignoble end to their lives and to the life of the man who gave us, among other great works, the marvelous short poem “Ozymandias”—a short poem that reminds us how fleeting fame and life can be.
Of course, conspiracy theories abound. At the time, some thought the Don Juan might have been rammed and deliberately sunk by people intent on doing Shelley harm. Perhaps it was someone to whom he owed money; there were many such folks in that category. Some suggested that pirates may have been responsible, or perhaps folks opposed to Shelley’s controversial political views might have planned it. But the storm and overall lack of seamanship skills are the likely culprits.
Later it became clear that others in passing boats had seen the foundering craft but declined to help. In those days and in that part of Italy, anyone who rescued sailors in trouble and brought them back to shore would have to remain in quarantine for several days or be subject to customs searches before they could resume their journeys.
Shelley’s body washed ashore on July 18 after the yacht and its crew had been missing for ten days. The body of Edward Williams had rolled up onto the beach south of Viareggio near the mouth of the Serchio River and the village of Migliarino, in the midst of one of those large coastal clusters of umbrella pines. Another body, believed to be that of the eighteen-year-old Charles Vivian, washed up onto a beach at Massa, north of today’s Marina di Pietrasanta. The storm pushed a dinghy, thought to be from the Don Juan, onto the beach at Motrone, a onetime medieval port and now a tiny enclave of Marina di Pietrasanta.
Vivian’s body, reduced in the sea to a skeleton, had been quickly cremated on the spot at Massa and the ashes mixed into the sand. Williams’s body a few miles to the south was also cremated after several days. Lord Byron, Byron’s friend Leigh Hunt, and Trelawny handled the cremations of Williams and Shelley. They had a Livorno craftsman make a portable iron furnace—a device “of iron bars and strong sheet-iron supported on a stand.”
Meanwhile, authorities at Viareggio, citing health reasons, wouldn’t allow Shelley’s body to be moved. It was sprinkled with lime and covered by sand while permission was being sought for cremation.
With permission finally in hand, Trelawny, Lord Byron, and a Tuscan health official attended Shelley’s cremation using the portable iron furnace. Soldiers who escorted the party collected wood, and Shelley’s body, unrecognizable except for his clothes, was placed on the pyre. Trelawny and others sprinkled salt and frankincense over the body and, for added accelerant, poured copious quantities of wine over it before setting the pyre ablaze.
A popular 1889 painting by Louis Edouard Fournier—created in 1889, sixty-seven years after the event—shows Lord Byron, Trelawny, and Hunt watching the cremation. In reality, Byron couldn’t bear watching his friend burn. A famous swimmer known for swimming from Venice’s Lido to the Grand Canal, he waded into the surf of the Ligurian Sea and swam out to his boat anchored off shore. Hunt sat out the spectacle in a nearby carriage.
Shelley’s wife, Mary Shelley, creator of Frankenstein, wasn’t there, despite being depicted in the painting as kneeling in the sand a short distance away. Some sources say her presence at a cremation would have offended pre-Victorian sensibilities. It was thought that such an event was not good for a woman’s health.
Perhaps what followed was not grotesque by 1822 standards, but someone smacked Shelley’s skull with a heavy object to allow the fire to consume the brain. And Trelawny, seeing Shelley’s heart—some sources say it might have been his saltwater-preserved liver—untouched by fire, removed it to preserve it for Mary Shelley. After Mary Shelley’s death in 1851, silk-wrapped remains of her husband’s “heart” and some ashes were found in her desk drawer, reportedly wrapped in a paper copy of the Percy Shelley poem “Adonais,” his elegy on the death of Keats. Eventually, they would make their way into the grave of the couple’s son, Sir Percy Florence Shelley.
The poet’s ashes are interred in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, near the grave of his friend Keats, who had died a year earlier. Trelawny’s ashes—he died in 1881—are buried next to Shelley’s simple marker.
I don’t know if the precise site of Shelley’s “funeral” on that once-isolated beach ever was identified. There doesn’t appear to be any evidence of a marker along the shoreline. One report had the body washing up just one and a half miles north of Viareggio’s small harbor. Today, a spot at that distance from the harbor is awash in beach umbrellas and sunbathing Europeans. A wide pedestrian boulevard runs through Viareggio along the beach edge for nearly two miles. Piazza Shelley, with a marker noting the poet’s demise at Viareggio—it does not identify where the body was cremated—is near the small port and two blocks from the sea.
Unlike that of the long-forgotten emperor Ozymandias, the spirit of the Englishman, who died a month before his thirtieth birthday, remains with us.
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Viareggio lies at the southern edge of Versilia. Other villages along the coastline have their own sand and sea that draw tourists, primarily inland Italians, Europeans, Brits, and Australians. Pietrasanta, which dates back to the mid-thirteenth century, is one of the villages of the group, but sits a few miles inland. The separate town of Marina di Pietrasanta, two miles to the west of Pietrasanta’s historic center, has its own resorts, hotels, and private beaches. Along with Forte dei Marmi and Lido di Camaiore, these sand strips evolved from tiny fishing villages into tourist destinations sometime around the late nineteenth century.
Inland Pietrasanta is packed with visitors during July and August. They seem to blanket the beach areas during the day, and in the evening wander, on foot or bicycle or rental car, into the town and sit in a half-dozen or so bars and nearly three dozen restaurants until well past midnight. Most of the other interior towns and villages are generally left to the locals during the hot summer months.
Beaches along the entire Tuscan shoreline from Carrara to Orbetello vary between rocky and sandy; most of Versilia’s are sandy, and many are private; a visitor has to pay a fee to a concessionaire to use showers and cabanas with locks on the doors and to sit on rented recliners in the shade of uniformly colored, numbered umbrellas. These private sections, interspersed here and there by public beaches where local folks haul in their own umbrellas and spread out large towels, are often booked solid during July and August. Many vacationers return year after year to reclaim their own ten square feet of sand, hoping eventually to work the
ir way to the front rows and unblocked views of the sea.
These beaches represent the side of Versilia sought by most tourists. There certainly is another side as well. One way for adventurous travelers to spend a few days in this area is to get noses out of guidebooks and simply wander from one village to another along narrow, postwar roads built to replace the mule tracks that for centuries were their only connection with one another. A highlight of such a journey is to occasionally stop in a village’s main square to enjoy an espresso or a cold drink, sit at an outdoor table, and observe daily life in a small town.
Such visits into the coastal interior allow travelers to discover the beauty of forests blanketed with pines and chestnut and oak trees. Many of the stone villages and smaller borghi, or clusters of just a few houses, are true hilltop Tuscan villages without overly sandblasted pretention and trinket shops that are found more often in classical Tuscany to the east. How wonderful it is to wander through a medieval village where shopkeepers don’t even sell postcards, much less touristy T-shirts and glass representations of the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
One way to experience this kind of travel is to follow, on foot or bicycle, portions of a pathway known as the Via Francigena, roughly translated as “French road” or “route of the Franks.” This was considered during the Middle Ages as one of Italy’s most important roads. Pilgrims from all over Europe, beginning during the eighth or ninth centuries, used the 1,180-mile trail between Canterbury in England and Rome for devotional and faith-sustaining journeys to the Holy City. Now much of the well-mapped trail has been asphalted.
Travelers through the early to late Middle Ages made the journey by crossing the English Channel, journeying through France, transiting the Alps, and dropping down into northern Italy.
First mentioned in documents from the mid-ninth century, the Francigena enters modern Tuscany high up in the northwest, following a route from Parma and Piacenza in Emilia-Romagna and down into Tuscany along the valley of the Magra River. It runs north to south through the ancient village of Pontremoli in the Tuscan province of Massa-Carrara and, when the Francigena comes within a mile or so of the modern coast at Carrara, it turns slightly southeast, moving through Massa and into the Province of Lucca at Forte dei Marmi. Then it goes directly through the historic center of Pietrasanta where it leaves the Roman road and begins its gradual shift southeast toward Tuscany’s center, because travelers and pilgrims were often leery of pirates and other brigands along the more coastal route. The road goes to a point below Valdicastello di Carducci and then through rolling foothills on to Camaiore before continuing south toward Lucca. It is there where the Apuan range ends and the great plain of central Tuscany begins. The pilgrim road bypasses Pisa and heads toward Siena and beyond in eastern Tuscany before leaving Tuscany behind, a few miles north of the Lazio-region town of Aquapendente.
Today, the route is clearly marked on special maps and by small wooden signs. Each day in Pietrasanta, from early spring to late fall, modern wanderers on this road pause in Pietrasanta’s main piazza for rest and relaxation.
Some adventurous souls take the entire route, starting at Canterbury and going all the way to Rome in one or two seasons. Others traverse just portions of it, such as the clearly delineated route through Tuscany. Many sections can accommodate automobiles. I traveled short stretches on foot, between Pietrasanta and Valdicastello and a few miles beyond—often finding myself surrounded in pleasant silence in the midst of Tuscan bosci (forests) and only greeted by a few cars.
Just a brief stretch runs along the coast, roughly following those ancient Roman-built routes through Versilia: Via Aemilia Scaura and Via Aurelia. Via Aemilia Scaura originally flanked the sea from Genoa to Pisa. There, the Via Aurelia went from Pisa to Rome. Today, the ancient name of Aemilia Scaura has been discarded, and the road, now Strada Statale 1 (SS1), is known only as Via Aurelia.
Ancient and medieval travelers could choose to split off from the Via Aurelia at Luni, that ancient Roman port just over the modern boundary of northern Tuscany, and take the Via Cassia, which turns sharply to the east and then flows south through the Serchio River Valley along the foothills of the Apennine Mountains before turning southwest toward Rome. But the Via Cassia would have been a much longer and more difficult journey for these medieval travelers and pilgrims.
The Serchio River segment might have been preferred during hot-weather months when the mountain valley is cooler than the coastal route. Or travelers may have wanted the alternative route to avoid the malarial swamps that blanketed much of the Versilian coastline.
Either route included plenty of monasteries and churches, some built specifically to house pilgrims needing shelter for the night or for several days of respite to recover from an arduous journey that would take months to complete.
Along the Tuscan coastal route, the oldest church in Versilia, Pieve di Santi Giovanni e Felicità, sits just a mile or so from Pietrasanta and just off the narrow canyon road that leads to the suburb of Valdicastello di Carducci. This church, with its heavily illustrated bronze doors, dates back to the ninth century—around the time pilgrims first started to use the Via Francigena. A day’s walk farther along the clearly marked pathway, now barely wide enough for automobiles, is the inland town of Camaiore, where pilgrims could find many hostels and inns and worship in the Church of Santo Stefano.
The Via Francigena also was the route of armies traveling down the peninsula, including, in 1096, Crusaders commanded by Frenchman Hugh of Vermandois. He was on his way to join up, in Constantinople, with other armies called by Pope Urban II on the First Crusade. His Crusader army stopped briefly at Rome and then moved southeast through the Italian peninsula, eventually arriving in Syria and Palestine. Their goal: capturing Jerusalem from the Muslims, who had taken over the city from the Greek Christians of Byzantium, 558 years earlier in AD 638.
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Deep inland, within the northwestern coastal strip of Tuscany that makes up what locals call Alta (Upper) Versilia, are numerous small villages. All are connected by a series of asphalt roads that narrowly wind their way up steep hillsides, repeatedly doubling back on themselves before topping ridgelines. It is a relatively recent phenomenon, mostly in the years following World War II, that many of the roads in this high-mountain countryside were slightly widened and paved over to accept trucks and automobiles.
Many of the hamlets, and even the larger comune, or municipality, of Stazzema have parking lots at their village entrances. The “streets” to businesses and homes are barely wide enough for two people to walk side by side. There is no way for motorized vehicles, except for the occasional scooter, to enter the tiny commercial center or even to park at the medieval stone houses.
On one bright summer afternoon, I drove a rental car into Stazzema and didn’t see obvious signs banning vehicles. I had no inkling that the cobblestone path that extended from the parking lot would get progressively narrower. I drove a few hundred feet toward the village center before realizing that building walls were closing in on me. Backing out was awkward. Two elderly villagers saw my predicament, and with one guiding from the front and the other behind, I made it out into the parking lot with just a small (but expensive) scratch on my rear bumper. It took thirty seconds to go in and twenty minutes to back out, slowly and painfully. I sat on a bench in the tree-lined parking area overlooking a deep, wide gully and listened as the two gentlemen, with great humor, described similar motorist mistakes in their village.
Perhaps this lack of motorized access is why the town hall for the county of Stazzema is located not in the comune of Stazzema but closer to the main highway, several miles to the west in the more-open village of Pontestazzemese. This town is more drivable and boasts several convenient parking lots.
Sometimes, the roads connecting the fifteen tiny hamlets that are administratively tied to Stazzema drop down along fast-flowing streams and the Vezza River that, every few years in wet early springs or late falls, can overwhelm this part of mountaino
us Tuscany and explode out of their rocky beds. Roads and portions of some small villages, often washed away by such high water, have been repeatedly rebuilt over the decades.
This happened, on June 19, 1996, in the village of Cardoso, well east of the marble-processing center of Seravezza and north of coastal Pietrasanta.
Within six hours on that day, nearly sixteen inches of rain fell on the village and the steep slopes of the Versilia Valley. Thirteen people died in the Vezza River’s rushing waters, one remained missing, and the body of a five-year-old child from Cardoso was found twenty miles away on a Ligurian beach near Portovenere, just across the Tuscany line.
Cardoso was nearly destroyed, and four other villages around Stazzema—Farnocchia, Pruno, Volegno, Pomezzana—were isolated for several days. In the wider Versilia area, the Via Aurelia along the coast between Pietrasanta and Querceta, a few miles to the north, was washed out and closed for two weeks, as was the main Genoa–Rome railway line.
Driving through Versilia Valley and along the Vezza River today, one will see a rebuilt and restored Cardoso, its buildings still holding tight against the Vezza River, its water barely a trickle in August. The village center is strung out along the narrow valley and is separated from the waterway by a slim road and a low stone wall. On the opposite bank, a couple of eating establishments and bed-and-breakfast inns sit just a few feet above the river’s stones along the water’s edge.
In my brief time there, I spent an hour sitting on that stone wall sampling local cheeses and the village’s famous variety of mortadella, made by mixing lean pork, small cubes of pork fat, spices, and a variety of wild herbs harvested from nearby hillsides. The Vezza flowed gently at my side, and sounds of the deep Tuscan mountains swirled around me, natural sounds enhanced by the quiet life in this mountain village.
* * *
Early one August morning and on a whim, I turned off the main road above Seravezza at the point where the Vezza River from the east joins with the Serra River (known historically as the Riomagno) from its origins in the far north, around Azzano, near the foot of Michelangelo’s mountain.