Palazzo Mocenigo Grand Canal
About Lord Byron
Lord Byron at work
Plaque on the exterior of the Palazzo
Having led a scandalous existence in England (at the start of a hectic love-affair with Lady Caroline Lamb she wrote in her journal ''Mad, bad and dangerous to know''), a wealthy aristocrat yet with rising debts, and with rumours starting to rise of his incest and bisexuality, Byron left England in 1816, never to return.
He lived in Venice for almost three years and his amorous and literary exploits have been much documented. While there he proudly claimed to have enjoyed the company of a different woman on 200 consecutive evenings.
Yet between bouts of Venetian libertinism, he managed to write the final cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgramage, the poem Beppo, large parts of his memoirs, sundry other lyrics, some verse drama, dozens and dozens of letters, and the first sections of his masterpiece Don Juan. The most notorious Romantic poet and satirist, Byron created his own cult of personality, the concept of the 'Byronic hero' - a defiant, melancholy young man, brooding on some mysterious, unforgivable in his past. Three hundred years later he is revered as one of England’s greatest poets.
Post-Napoleonic Venice, with its twenty thousand prostitutes, its gambling houses and theatres, was perfectly suited to the poet. Both were hedonistic, notorious, irreligious and decadent. Byron wasted no time in getting in the ‘Venetian swing’ - within four days of his arrival he had moved out of his hotel, stabled his horses, rented a flat, and fallen ‘fathomlessly in love’.
After about a year he moved to much grander accommodation: the Palazzo Mocenigo, on the southern curve of the Grand Canal with its atmospheric cloistered gardens and palatial rooms, and started his famous affair with Margarita Cogni, ‘La Fornarina‘, the beautiful wife of a local baker. This is where Byron installed his carriages, his manservant, his mistress, as well as, on the ground floor, several cats, a mastiff, a pair of cranes, a fox, a wolf, at least two monkeys and a sickly crow. The rent was the princely sum of €400 per year.
Equally evocative is the canal-front of the palazzo, where Byron and friend Shelley would alight after their nocturnal ramblings; where La Fornarina once stood, in a storm, anxiously awaiting his return ‘with her great black eyes flashing through her tears’; and where Byron once paused, alone, clutching his cane, pondering whether to return to England and his foes.
Web links of interest:
- The International Byron Society - www.internationalbyronsociety.org
- The Life and Work of Lord Byron - www.englishhistory.net/byron.html
- Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron
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