At Lerici we took a boat and pushed into the rolling breakers.  Christian now felt the movement of the sea for the first time.  This was rather a rude trial, for the grey-maned monsters played, as it seemed, at will with our cockle-shell, tumbling in dolphin curves to reach the shore.  Our boatmen knew all about Shelley and the Casa Magni.  It is not at Lerici, but close to San Terenzio, upon the south side of the village.  Looking across the bay from the molo, one could clearly see its square white mass, tiled roof, and terrace built on rude arcades with a broad orange awning.  Trelawny’s description hardly prepares one for so considerable a place.  I think the English exiles of that period must have been exacting if the Casa Magni seemed to them no better than a bathing-house.

We left our boat at the jetty, and walked through some gardens to the villa.  There we were kindly entertained by the present occupiers, who, when I asked them whether such visits as ours were not a great annoyance, gently but feelingly replied:  ’It is not so bad now as it used to be.’  The English gentleman who rents the Casa Magni has known it uninterruptedly since Shelley’s death, and has used it for villeggiatura during the last thirty years.  We found him in the central sitting-room, which readers of Trelawny’s ‘Recollections’ have so often pictured to themselves.  The large oval table, the settees round the walls, and some of the pictures are still unchanged.  As we sat talking, I laughed to think of that luncheon party, when Shelley lost his clothes, and came naked, dripping with sea-water, into the room, protected by the skirts of the sympathising waiting-maid.  And then I wondered where they found him on the night when he stood screaming in his sleep, after the vision of his veiled self, with its question, ‘Siete soddisfatto?’

There were great ilexes behind the house in Shelley’s time, which have been cut down, and near these he is said to have sat and written the ‘Triumph of Life.’  Some new houses, too, have been built between the villa and the town; otherwise the place is unaltered.  Only an awning has been added to protect the terrace from the sun.  I walked out on this terrace, where Shelley used to listen to Jane’s singing.  The sea was fretting at its base, just as Mrs. Shelley says it did when the Don Juan disappeared.

From San Terenzio we walked back to Lerici through olive woods, attended by a memory which toned the almost overpowering beauty of the place to sadness.

VII.—­VIAREGGIO

The same memory drew us, a few days later, to the spot where Shelley’s body was burned.  Viareggio is fast becoming a fashionable watering-place for the people of Florence and Lucca, who seek fresher air and simpler living than Livorno offers.  It has the usual new inns and improvised lodging-houses of such places, built on the outskirts of a little fishing village, with a boundless stretch of noble sands.  There is a wooden pier on which we walked, watching the long roll of waves, foam-flaked, and quivering with moonlight.  The Apennines faded into the grey sky beyond, and the sea-wind was good to breathe.  There is a feeling of ‘immensity, liberty, action’ here, which is not common in Italy.  It reminds us of England; and to-night the Mediterranean had the rough force of a tidal sea.