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Updated: June 12, 2025
We are not so far from Porto Venere, and then on the highway towards Massa, not long after you have come out of the beautiful avenue of plane trees, itself like some great temple, through which the road leaves Sarzana, you come upon the little city of Luna, or the bright fragments of it, among the sand of what must once have been the seashore, with here a fold of the old amphitheatre, there the curve of the circus, while scattered on the grass softer than sleep, you may find perhaps the carved name of a goddess, the empty pedestal of a statue.
As our carriage creeps slowly upward, we find the land less cultivated, and now and again we pass tracts of woodland whence little purling streams fall over rocky ledges on to the roadway. We catch sight of small clumps of cyclamen, and in the shady hollows we detect tufts of the maiden-hair fern—Capilli di Venere, “Venus’ tresses,” as the Italians sometimes call this graceful little plant.
The Keats was doubled open at the "Lamia." Trelawney Records. Pickering, 1878, pp. 197-200, accepts this story, as clearing up what for fifty years had been a mystery to him. It is perhaps a more joyful day that may be spent at Porto Venere, the little harbour on the northern shores of the gulf.
And there, too, on the road to Tuscany, after the pleasant weariness of the way, which is so much longer than those others, some fragment of antiquity is to be the reward of your journey, though nothing so fine as the deserted holiness of Paestum, only the dust of the white temple of Aphrodite crowning the western horn of Spezia, where it rises splendid out of the sea in the sun of Porto Venere.
And, as it seems to me, by reason of some magic which still haunts this mysterious seashore, it is ever that world half pagan that you seek, leaving Spezia very gladly every morning for San Terenzo and Lerici for Porto Venere and the enchanted coast.
But none other than Titian himself could have painted the superb head, which he himself has hardly surpassed. It is curious and instructive to find the artist, in a letter addressed to Philip on the 2nd of December 1567, announcing the despatch, together with the just now described altar-piece, The Martyrdom of St. Lawrence, of "una pittura d'una Venere ignuda" the painting of a nude Venus.
In the afternoon, we entered by the Porti di Venere into the bay, or gulf of Spetia or Spezza, which was the Portus Lunae of the ancients. This bay, at the mouth of which lies the island Palmaria, forms a most noble and secure harbour, capacious enough to contain all the navies in Christendom.
The island of Palmaria, rich in veined marbles, shelters the port; so that outside the sea rages, while underneath the town, reached by a narrow strait, there is a windless calm. It was not without reason that our Lady of Beauty took this fair gulf to herself; and now that she has long been dispossessed, her memory lingers yet in names. For Porto Venere remembers her, and Lerici is only Eryx.
In the cool of the afternoon you leave Camogli and climb by the byways to Ruta, whence you may see all the Gulf of Genoa, with the proud city herself in the lap of the mountains, and there, yes, far away, you may see the stainless peaks of Tuscany, whiter than snow, shining in the quiet afternoon; and nearer, but still far away, the crest of the horn of Spezia, with the ruined church of Porto Venere a church or a temple, is it? on the headland beside the island of Palmaria.
On the Scoglio di Venere, near Naples, he built the Villa de Angelis, and there henceforth passed all except the hottest months of the year. Shortly after the completion of the villa Jocelyn left him suddenly, and became a Carthusian monk. A caustic note in his diary hinted that even this foul parasite was shocked into the austerest form of religion by something he had seen going forward.
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