Set in Stone

Harry Mount

Two hundred years ago, in 1817, Byron travelled to Rome, and then to Venice, where he wrote the fourth canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. A quote from it appears on this statue of Byron in the Villa Borghese gardens in Rome.

Byron is as celebrated in southern Europe as he is in his homeland. In Greece, he is still something of a national hero after his death in 1824 in Missolonghi. Byron and his Greek allies were preparing to attack the Ottoman fortress of Lepanto on the Gulf of Corinth when he died of a fever. Today, ‘Vyron’, the Greek version of Byron, is a popular name in Greece, and there is another statue to Byron in Athens.

As well as celebrating Greece in his poems, Byron lavishes praise on Italy. In that fourth canto of Childe Harold, he wrote: Fair Italy! Thou art the garden of the world, the home Of all art yields, and nature can decree. This inscription appears on the other side of this statue. The statue was raised in 1959 by a group of Italian, English and American admirers of the poet. It is a copy of the statue by the great Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen in the library of Trinity College, Cambridge. The original statue was sculpted in 1834 but for ten years no one wanted anything to do with the roguish poet. St Paul’s Cathedral, Westminster Abbey, the British Museum and the National Gallery all turned it down before Trinity accepted it.