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Mary Shelley and the sea

The love, the grief and the hope in the Gulf of Poets

Let's face the truth.

Our Gulf "doesn't seem of this Earth".

These are words that people who are not born around here are used to say. Around the place that invites the mind to think about the strangest thoughts [...] taking it away from the reality, leading the mind to get to know the surreal.

These are thoughts of Mary Shelly, who lived at the Villa Magni in San Terenzo.

For sure, Shelleys were not to much attracted by the locals, they looked at them as crude and dunce people used to speak in a hateful dialect. However, this was not enogh to keep them away, to let them not fall in love with the beauty of the nature or to not leave them breathless in front of it.

A lethal beauty.

Such a lethal beauty that in the 1822 Mary's husband, Percy Shelley, died in rowing in the bay - he drowned during a storm on his new "goletta" while sealing to San Terenzo.

Mary will devote him hearthbreaking words:

«Ah! he is gone — and I alone;

How dark and dreary seems the time!

‘Tis Thus, when the glad sun is flown,

Night rushes o’er the Indian clime.

Is there no star to cheer this night

No soothing twilight for the breast?

Yes, Memory sheds her fairy light,

Pleasing as sunset’s golden west.

And hope of dawn — Oh! brighter far

Than clouds that in the orient burn;

More welcome than the morning star

Is the dear thought — he will return!»

Hearthbroken, Mary left our Gulf.

The sea that Shelley had loved found then the way to keep it forever captivated him.

Who knows.
I wonder if Shelley did.

"...E naufragar m'è dolce in questo mare."

by Gemma Giancarè

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Mary Shelley and the sea

The love, the grief and the hope in the Gulf of Poets

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