The Casina Rossa

The pink house, called the Casina Rossa, where the greatest Romantic poet of them all -John Keats - died stands near the beautiful Spanish Steps in Rome. Visiting is free although it is a steep climb up three levels of stairs to enter this very English museum. The climb is well-worth it if you are a fan of Keats and the Romantic poets, however.

As the volunteer guide remarked: "The Romantic poets didn’t sit around and stare out of the window like Emily Dickinson – they got out and did things!" (Apologies to all Emily Dickinson fans - I like her poetry myself.) There is some truth in this remark, though. Keats packed a lot into his tragically short life. As well as writing some of the most beautiful poetry ever written, including the wonderful 'Ode to a Nightingale', he became a junior surgeon, became engaged to pretty and flirtatious Fanny Brawne, and made friends with other Romantic poets, including Lord Byron.

Told by his doctors to seek a warmer climate than foggy England’s for the sake of his health, Keats traveled to Rome with his friend, fellow poet, Joseph Severn.

Cared for by his friend, Severn, Keats only lived in this small, but tastefully furnished apartment for three months before he died at twenty-five. Here he could overlook the bustling Piazza while he struggled with his illness - tuberculosis - and tried to continue writing. He only managed to write a few letters - he was too ill to write poetry. Severn rented a piano and played Haydn’s symphonies to Keats to make his time a little happier. The bed where Keats died is still visible.

In fact, although this is an interesting place to visit it can also be very affecting and even creepy. As well as containing many paintings, documents, and first editions, there is a death-mask of Keats on the wall of the wood-paneled apartment. The Victorians, more used to death than we are, had a different attitude towards it, and this type of mask wasn’t unusual. It will make any fan of the poets feel much closer to them and would be an especially interesting for anyone studying English Literature.

The museum is also dedicated to the other Romantic poets, including Shelley and Byron, who also lived in Italy, and contains locks of hair of Milton and Elizabeth Barret Browning, one of Wordsworth’s letters, and a first edition of Shelley’s Revolt of Islam.

After visiting the museum, it will lift the spirits to go shopping on the exclusive Via Veneto or visit the park at the top of the Spanish Steps and enjoy the wonderful view.

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PISA'S CAFÉ DELL'USSERO: A RENDEZVOUS FOR ARTISTS



In May 1845 John Ruskin prolonged his stay in Pisa in order to draw the early 15th -century Palazzo Agostini on the Lungarno, or river bank, of the Tuscan city. "There is nothing like it in Italy that I know of", he said; and, writing to his father, he added: "They have knocked a great hole in the middle to put up a shield with a red lion and a yellow cock upon it for the sign of a consul, and they have knocked another at the bottom to put up a sign of a soldier riding a horse on two legs, with inscription All'Ussero Café." The sign mentioned by Ruskin was short-lived, since it was thrown into the River Arno the following year by liberal students who could not even stand the sight of that Hussar. It reminded them of Austrian rule over partitioned Italy; but the Café, one of the oldest in Europe, is still there. It has been there since 1775, as attested by copies of documents, letters, and contracts exhibited on its walls, which mention the presence of a Café on the ground floor of the late-Gothic brick Palazzo Agostini in the very heart of Pisa, next door to the oldest hotel in town, the Victoria, patronised, among others, by Ruskin and Dickens, and even by British royalty. Several police reports in the local Public Records Office reveal that for over two centuries this historic Café has been the favourite resort of radical Mazzinian students and of the more open-minded dons from the nearby University, who used to convene there not only to sip a cup of coffee and play billiards, but also to discuss political issues and comment upon gazette reports on revolutionary movements in the Papal States or in the Kingdom of Naples, then under Bourbon rule, and which had been the subject of Shelley's "Ode to Liberty", or his "Sonnet on the Republic of Benevento". Contraband translations of such works of Byron as The Prophecy of Dante or The Lament of Tasso were also circulated and read in the Café, and they inflamed the minds of students like F.D. Guerrazzi and Giuseppe Montanelli, who were later to play an important political rÛle in the Italian Risorgimento. Other students who were to become some of the most renowned nineteenth-century lyric poets and satirists in verse, such as Giuseppe Giusti, Renato Fucini, and Giosuè Carducci - the first Italian to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1906 - made their first improvvisazioni in the lively atmosphere of the Caffè dell'Ussero, as was the case with Antonio Guadagnoli, who, according to Giacomo Leopardi, had made a fool of himself by improvising playful verses on his own long nose in the Accademia dei Lunatici, the literary salon of Madame Mason, formerly Lady Mountcashel, who had played host to Percy and Mary Shelley, and particularly to Claire Clairmont, during their stay in Pisa. By the turn of the century, this literary Café had been transformed into a Café-chantant, and then into one of the first cinemas in Tuscany, only to be restored to its original function at the end of the First World War. In the twentieth century the Caffè dell'Ussero resumed its literary and artistic vein, and it was attended by artists like Marinetti, the founder of the Futurist Movement, Guglielmo Marconi, Charles Lindberg, opera singer Renata Tebaldi, and scores of Pisa University students, who were later to distinguish themselves in a variety of professions; some of them, such as Enrico Fermi and Carlo Rubbia, were to win the Nobel Prize, while others would become Prime Ministers or Presidents of the Republic.

Caffè dell’Ussero - Lungarno Pacinotti, 27 – Pisa (Italy)
http://www.ussero.com info@ussero.com

It is a monument to Italian culture in the 1400's Palazzo Agostini, on Lungarno. Its walls are covered with glorious memories from its most famous visitors of the Risorgimento when they were students: Carlo Goldoni, Gacomo Casanova, Vittorio Alfieri, Filippo Mazzei, John Ruskin, Domenico Guerrazzi, Giuseppe Giusti, Renato Fucini, Giosuè Carducci, Cesare Abba, Giuseppe Montanelli. In 1839, it was seat of the meetings of the first Italian Congress of Scientists