Byron in Venice

‘I want to see Venice, and the Alps, and Parmesan cheeses.’ So wrote Lord Byron in 1814, some two years before he settled — if that is the word — in the lagoon city. Even after his arrival in the winter of 1816, Venice retained its fantastical allure: he identified with its decay (which he would still find today) and savoured its lack of tourists (which he would not). The city was, he wrote, ‘the greenest island of my imagination’, a place that had soon established itself as his ‘head, or rather my heart, quarters.’

It certainly had his blood pumping: for Byron, Venice became a playground for all manner of physical exertion. There was one of his implausible swims, for four hours from the Lido to St Mark’s Square, then on down the length of the Grand Canal. There was a lot of rowing. And there were the daily rides near the ancient Jewish cemetery — for a time accompanied by Percy Shelley, who gave them poetic purpose in ‘Julian and Maddalo’, in which Byron becomes ‘a Venetian nobleman of ancient family and of great fortune’ (which no doubt he wished he was).

Then, notoriously, there was sex — and plenty of it. Byron embarked on countless liaisons in Venice — with 200 women in less than three years, he sometimes claimed — and bragged of them in letters back to London. ‘So we’ll go no more a roving/ So late into the night’, he wrote after the carnival of 1817, lines that have sometimes been taken as a poignant recognition that youth must have its end. But they were more like the routine of a man who hams up his hangover: the following year’s festivities would keep Byron just as busy.