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Tuscany: On to the heart of the sunrise Byron, Shelley, the Brownings, Lawrence - the Tuscan landscape has long inspired the English poets. It has also brought them to the grave

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From: The Independent - London
Date: 20000429
Author:Tony Grant

There was only one Englishman burning on the beach at Viareggio that hot August afternoon in 1822 - the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley had died mysteriously at sea days earlier, and his body had been washed ashore at this Tuscan seaside town. It was identified by his friend Edward Trelawny, who'd noted a copy of Aeschylus in one pocket, a volume of Keats in another.

Trelawny joined two of Shelley's other friends at the funeral: his fellow poet Lord Byron and the publisher Leigh Hunt, who described it as a beautiful yet distressing occasion: "The yellow sand and blue sky were intensely contrasted ...

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