The Byron Museum opens in Ravenna at Palazzo Guiccioli

The story of the poet-symbol of Romanticism starts again from Ravenna with the inauguration, on November 29th, of the Byron and Risorgimento Museum in Palazzo Guiccioli. The imposing historic residence has been transformed into a museum complex in which, on two floors and across 2,220 square meters and twenty-four rooms, the threads of Byron’s long stay in the city and the love that linked him to Countess Teresa are reunited Guiccioli, who led the English exile to Ravenna, and the civil passion that germinated at the meeting with the Carboneria. First step on the road that would lead the great poet to dedicate himself to the cause of people’s freedom and join the Greek independence activists.

Thanks to an important restoration work, on the initiative of the Cassa di Risparmio di Ravenna Foundation, the rooms where Byron loved and wrote come back to life (here he composed, among others, the ‘Don Juan’, the last canto of the ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, ‘Marino Faliero’, ‘Sardanapalus’, ‘The Two Foscari’, ‘The Prophecy of Dante’), while the experience interactive and intermedial designed by Studio Azzurro transports visitors to the 19th century of Ravenna, a mirror of poetic and patriotic impulses that spread throughout Europe. Alongside Teresa’s sentimental memorabilia, valuable editions and Risorgimento relics, including those from the Spadolini Nuova Antologia Foundation and the Bettino Craxi Foundation, Palazzo Guiccioli also houses the Doll Museum – Graziella Gardini Pasini Collection. The Palace also became the Italian headquarters of the Byron Society.

“Roman, Byzantine, Ostrogothic, Dantesque… of the many faces of Ravenna, perhaps nineteenth-century Ravenna is the one that up to now has found least space in the biography of the City – explains Ernesto Giuseppe Alfieri of the Italian Byron Society and the Cassa di Risparmio di Ravenna Foundation , who oversaw the initiative of the museum ‘turning point’ of Palazzo Guiccioli – With the inauguration of the museum complex we offer visitors the opportunity to ‘walk’ through that century, in the footsteps of Lord Byron, Teresa Gamba Guiccioli and the men and women who dreamed and created a united Italy”.

“The love for Teresa led Byron to transform himself and, without becoming a saint, he changed his life. He went riding in the pine forest in Ravenna and here he met the Carbonari who greeted him in dialect but said they were ‘Americans’ – explains the president of Cassa di Ravenna Antonio Patuelli – Obviously they weren’t, but he, intrigued by this oddity, deepened his knowledge to the point of helping that movement which was the first sowing of the Risorgimento after the Congress of Vienna, for that harvest that would then be realized with Mazzini, Garibaldi and Cavour – he adds – a need and a dream were combined. The need was that of the Municipality, which had inherited the Palace, to allocate it to an adequate use, the our dream was to see it dedicated to its most illustrious inhabitant”.

“A new page in the history of Ravenna enclosed in an architectural jewel in the heart of the city – underlines Michele de Pascale, mayor of Ravenna – which will offer citizens and tourists an unmissable opportunity to learn about and discover the only museum in the world dedicated to the figure of Lord Byron, the Risorgimento museum and the Graziella Gardini Pasini Dolls Collection museum”.

One of the most imposing and elegant noble residences in the city, in the heart of the city, Palazzo Guiccioli was built at the end of the seventeenth century for the rise of the Osio family to the patriciate, and at the dawn of the nineteenth century it was acquired by Alessandro Guiccioli. Byron stayed there between 1819 and 1821 (he had followed his beloved Teresa Gamba, wife of Count Alessandro, forty years his senior, to Ravenna). During his stay, Percy Shelley came to visit. Oscar Wilde also stayed there later.