#poetry #peopletoknow 

"Why do you jump on the sparkling beach,
Waves in which no wind has carved furrows?
Why do you shake your steaming foam
In light swirls?
Why do you swing your foreheads as the dawn dries,
Forests, what do you storm before waking up?
Why from your branches you spread like rain
Those silent tears that bathed you in the night?
Why do you raise, oh flowers, your full cups,
like bent brow that love lifts?
Because in the humid shade, exhale these first ones
Perfumes that the day breathes? "

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790 - 1869), French writer, historian and politician, author among other things of The Poetic Meditations, had cousins in Livorno and came to visit them. Once again it is Pietro Vigo who brings back his words.


“I lived near Livorno in the Palmieri villa on the Montenero road; on the left I saw the wild peaks of the Limone Mountains, on the starboard the sea, facing Montenero. On the top of this head, leaning against the rock and green oaks, a church rises like a Greek temple with a view to the sea, and is a pilgrimage for the castaways who escaped from the storms, for the vows raised to the star of the sea. I liked this place so much that I often went up there. On the street is the villa, once splendid, then deserted, where Lord Byron stayed a summer or two some time before my abode in Livorno.
I used to stop with my horse in front of the door of his garden, as if looking for the absent figure of the great poet who in a certain way consecrated that solitude. A little further on I left the road driving the horses towards the Montenero inn to enter only the woods where the sea was visible. There I spent whole days in the company of my thoughts, with a book in hand, in the margin of which, I was writing the poems inspired by the sky and the sea. The bushes at the foot of the verdant oaks of Montenero kept for some time the pages torn from books and albums, where I tried to notice some songs, often interrupted by sleep, by whim, by the sunset of the day, and which I left in passages on the grass or on the sand in mockery of the wind».


Vigo claims that three of the compositions of the "Poetic and Religious Harmonies" were written in our woods. It seems that a gust of north wind made the notes of The Hymn fly in the morning, to the point that the poet had already given them up for lost. The next morning, however, a barefoot girl, a fisherman’s daughter, gave them back soaked in sea water. It seems that the father fished them out and made them read to some Capuchin friars who advised him to bring them back to the French author. As a reward, Lamartine offered the man as many coins as there were pages and bought the girl a new dress.