Stage of the trip to Italy of Carlo and Camilla of England is Ravenna where, in addition to the wonderful mosaics, the real ones will visit a new cultural site that is particularly close to the British. This is the museum dedicated to George Byron, recently inaugurated On the occasion of the 200 years of his death, occurred in 1824, after a careful renovation of Palazzo Guiccioli in via Cavour, in the heart of the city, promoted and supported by the Cassa di Risparmio di Ravenna Foundation. The palace bears the name of the family that hosted the poet between 1819 and 1821
In the rooms of this byron palace He stayed together with his cheerful daughter and hosted various friends like the poet Percy Shelley. Here he wrote the Don Juan And other important poems. It is said that he made long ridden in the pine forest, that he even swam to the large canal and that he learned and appreciated the habits of Italian family life. He attended the Carbonari (in the beautifully recovered cellar, today cafeteria, hid their weapons), approaching what was then the decision to join the cause of the “freedom of peoples” and die in Greece, where he had gone to support the independenceists, at just 36 years old.
Not only a cursed poet, great seducer, libertine, traveler, living image of the values of romanticism, Lord Byron was the precursor of today’s influencers, so much so that one of the rooms of this museum (the third in the world dedicated to him, after those in Great Britain and Greece) tells the byronmaniathat is, the success that, despite the poor means of communication of the time, had his figure in life and after death. Here we can admire his effigy reproduced on services of plates, rings, bracelets, pins, miniatures and illustrated books inspired by his most famous works.
And it is only one of the fascinating and innovative surprises of the new museumin which in addition to the classic exhibitions we also find a more modern narrative through “walls that speak” in the rooms where byron lived, he loved and wrote. These are real animations, activated by the visitor with devices placed in each room, which tell through sounds, videos and voices, its legendary biography. The public and committed and the private one: from her meeting with Teresa in the Venetian salons, to the map of her travels, until the possibility of listening to the declamation of the works.
Linked to emotions It is the part that shows the sentimental memories of the two lovers (jewels, curls of hair, messages), while the room dedicated to political horizons retains the precious letter that the poet wrote to Teresa da Missolungi in Greece, where he lost his life, and is the bridge towards the second part of this cultural experience, the Risorgimento Museum.
Here too the restoration gives visitors the possibility of multisensory experiences, retracing the history of the unification of Italy from the Napoleonic age to the myth of Giuseppe Garibaldi and his wife Anita, who died in these lands. An exhibition also characterized by a sort of collecting from below that has made it possible to document the story through the popular donations that made the collective memory the direct protagonists of the Risorgimento, leaving to the divided posters, hats, weapons that are added to the most institutional paintings, sculptures, photographs, correspondence and edicts and the section dedicated to Garibaldi thanks to the Spadolini and Craxi collections.
