The Ravenna Palazzo where Byron lived and loved is now a museum dedicated to his memory — and it's just been toured by Queen Camilla

If love were a country it would be Italy; if it were a poet, it would be Byron. Thus it is fitting that, on a Royal State Visit that coincided with her wedding anniversary to His Majesty King, the Queen — between a light-hearted state dinner with President Sergio Mattarella in Rome and a homage to Dante Alighieri’s tomb in Ravenna — found a moment to tour a newly reopened museum devoted to the Romantic poet.

Ravenna is perhaps best known for its Byzantine mosaics — indeed, the King headed to the Basilica of San Vitale and the golden splendour of the tiles that form the portraits of Emperor Justinian and his wife, Theodora — but it wasn’t art that brought Byron to the city: it was a love story to rival Shakespeare’s best.

In spring 1819, at a party in Venice, the poet had met the young and beautiful countess Teresa Guiccioli and had fallen for her and she — married to a man more than 40 years her senior — for him. When she returned home to Ravenna, Byron followed, taking lodgings at the Guicciolis’ 17th-century palazzo (and bringing along his menagerie that included, according to accounts by Percy Bysshe Shelley, three monkeys, five cats, an eagle, a crow and a falcon).

Over time, perhaps, the poet might have tired of his mistress — he did once confess to being ‘worn out in feelings’ — but another kind of passion spelled the end of their relationship: revolution. Byron had thrown his lot with the Risorgimento movement, which sought to rid Italy of the foreign yoke and forge it into an independent country; so had Teresa’s father and brother, Ruggiero and Pietro Gamba. When the Gambas were banished from Ravenna, Teresa and Byron left the city in their wake. Eventually, Ruggiero was allowed back home, on condition that his daughter return to her powerful husband. Still determined to fight against oppression, Byron and Teresa’s brother, Pietro, left for Greece, which was then rebelling against Ottoman rule. There, at Missolonghi, the poet died on April 19, 1824. A distraught Teresa would go on to write My Recollections of Lord Byron.

The building where they had once lived and loved, Palazzo Guiccioli, now owned by a local bank and reopened to the public late in 2024 after a lengthy restoration, houses, together with the Italian headquarters of the Byron Society, two museums; one devoted to the poet and the other to the Risorgimento cause he had espoused. The latter features weapons and uniforms, medals and posters, as well as multimedia displays bringing to life the years that made Italy into a country.

The Byron rooms include manuscripts, rare books, rings, sculptures and Guiccioli’s private mementos of him, including locks of his hair and even fragments of his skin. Nonetheless, the museum traces not only Byron’s stay in Ravenna and his torrid love story, but also how he shaped his life to fit his ideals.