A spontaneous walk above Lerici

No doubt at all: discovering Lerici and that part of the Ligurian coast as a guest at Gianluca Marcianò's Suoni dal Golfo Festival in late August was a revelation. Some years ago we walked the Cinque Terre route in late October, just after a storm had caused landslides; I'm told the route is choked now. So, much as I don't want to spread the news, come and ramble here. I've only touched the tip of the walking iceberg, but now I know where to start and where to get hold of maps, I'll be back.

To Tellaro, that is, the exquisite seaside village which was to be found ten minutes' walk from the simple but perfect Hotel Rosa dei Venti in Fiascherino where some of us were accommodated - infinitely preferable, I think, to the blingily redesigned and much more expensive Villa Magni, the Casa Shelley in San Terenzo.  Better views, too, especially from the roof terrace.

I only got to see Tellaro on my last morning, and fell in love. This was D H Lawrence and Virginia Woolf territory, as Lerici itself is proud to proclaim in literary posters. But now the area mostly has the air of an exclusively Italian holiday destination, and absolutely not a fancy one like nearby Portovenere, our starting-point for the Cinque Terre expedition.

Having walked around the promenade to Shelley's place and back, duly observing the plaque on the side of the now-hotel

and enjoyed the only attractive feature of its now-limited garden, the grotto,

I then thought I'd ignore warnings about the busy, twisting coastal road and head back up to the hotel. I'd heard that some steps up provided something of a short cut and a break from the speeding cars, but the ones I took went up...

and up, until I arrived by chance at the hill village of La Serra. This gives views right across the bay.

You get an especially good view of San Terenzo, which I've closed in on here. The Alps are visible, at least to the naked eye, beyond.

A bar was conveniently to hand, so I stocked up on liquid intake and then, mapless, had to take a gamble to get back to the hotel below at Fiascherino. Where would the road take me? Round the edge of the village at first, obviously.

But then it had to negotiate a wide valley, and continuing would take me beyond where I wanted to go. Seeing the wooded peninsula beneath,

I ventured on the first track I saw going down to the right, which soon joined up with what turned out to be the major footpath between Montemarcello - clearly the right destination for a longer walk - and Lerici.

There were handsome olive groves here,

and a view across to the south hillside with remains of ancient terracing,

and the wooded slopes of what turns out to be a national park ever more apparent as the track curves round the valley.

It was enticing to continue along the footpath more or less parallel with the sea, but I hazarded another guess turning down to the left, and that brought me out exactly where I needed to be. Needless to say the bus for the first concert in Lerici was 20 minutes late, so I missed the beginning of Samson Tsoy's recital, but what I heard of his Schubert and Schumann was wonderful, and afterwards the castle terrace gave good views out to the sunset.

Venus is shining, appropriately, above Portovenere here.

On my final morning there was time for a swim on the narrow but beautiful stretch of (public) beach below the hotel - daily circuits around a rock with a cormorant on it - before checking out

and then a stroll into Tellaro past the road to the Casa Lawrence

into the village where the road stops and it's pedestrians only,

taking in the beautiful Gothic virgin and child in the Church of Santa Maria Stella Maris - no information about it online -

and then wandering down to the harbour (Church of San Giorgio's tower under wraps)

before having coffee on a beautiful terrace with Jill Segal, whom I bumped into in Tellaro and whose organisational skills should save the festival from its only bad side - chaotic planning, quite a major fault. But I really wish it well, and hope it lives to tell another tale next summer. Whether that happens or not, I'll be back in the area, hopefully in the spring.

Death in the south

Romantic their poetic aspirations and their post-mortem canonisation may have been, but there was nothing mythical about the deaths of Keats and Shelley. I thought I owed my latest, serendipitous visit to their graves in the quiet corner of Rome that is the non-Catholic cemetery by the pyramid of Cestius a bit more background reading. Daisy Hay's Young Romantics proposes not only a more social history of the way in which the lives of the Shelleys were entangled with Byron as well as the lesser figure of Leigh Hunt, but a bigger celebration of those long-suffering half-sisters Mary Shelley and Claire (Jane) Clairmont.


Keats, alas, is a marginal figure in Hay's history - a shame, since he was probably the nicest of the male pack. Hay makes it clear what a catastrophe was his last-minute bolt for Rome in late 1820 with the helper who's buried beside him, the artist Joseph Severn.


The idea was to seek a warmer clime for Keats's advanced tuberculosis, but they should never have left England: the stormy channel crossing in cramped conditions was a nightmare for a sick man, and all Severn could do in those cramped lodgings by the Spanish Steps was try and allay his friend's 'dread of never seeing [England] more' and attempt to ease a horrible death. There's still a waft of bitterness from the inscription on Keats's grave, designed by Severn and Charles Brown


though a fairer plaque is set into the wall nearby.


This is the most open, green corner of the cemetery with views over to the pyramid.


Three-year old William Shelley had been buried nearby, one of several young victims of his parents' roving around Italy. He succumbed to malaria in Rome; not long before his baby sister Clara had fallen sick on an unnecessary, hasty and uncomfortable journey to Venice, and died in her mother's arms. The cause, as with so many unhappy instances in the fates of the Shelleys, sprang from Lord Byron's unfortunate liaison with Claire, which led the Shelley-Clairmont trio to Italy in the first place. This is hardly the place to try and untangle its web, but the offshoot of that relationship was in many ways the most tragic figure of all, the little girl Allegra - separated from her doting mother after the early months, and consigned by Byron against all Claire's pleadings to a convent on unhealthy land, where she died aged five.


In all this, one thing seems clear: for all the vaunted equality of the women - for which Mary's mother Mary Wollstonecraft had fought so hard - the men always closed ranks. But how young, how untested, they all were! Mary was still in her early twenties when, having suffered miscarriages, the loss of two treasured children and several depressions which seem all too explicable, Shelley (depicted by Severn in a posthumous image above writing Prometheus Unbound in the Baths of Caracalla) was drowned in the Bay of Lerici - an inexperienced boatman in a poorly constructed vessel, the Don Juan. Shelley's preferred name had been the Ariel, which may partly account for the inscription on the grave I found so useful for my only-connect Arts Desk piece on Abbado's Shakespeare programme.


But what's in the grave? All that remained from a messy attempted cremation of the disfigured, washed-up corpse on the beach at Viareggio was an organ Hay surmises was the liver rather than the heart, and even that was squabbled over before being handed over to Mary. And there it is, cor cordium. Bit of a mystery why Edward Trelawny, Shelley's bragging friend of less than a year, should be buried alongside him; but he'd bought the plot of land, and there he was interred at the age of 88 in 1881. Mary as keeper of the flame had lived on until 1851, always doing the decent thing by her late husband and preserving a measure of immortality through her Frankenstein. Claire maintained an uneasy independence as governess and died in 1879, almost 60 years after Shelley's drowning.