In the spring of 1819 the Shelleys settled in Rome, where the poet proceeded with the composition of “Prometheus Unbound”.  He used to write among the ruins of the Baths of Caracalla, not then, as now, despoiled of all their natural beauty, but waving with the Paradise of flowers and shrubs described in his incomparable letter of March the 23rd to Peacock.  Rome, however, was not destined to retain them long.  On the 7th of June they lost their son William after a short illness.  Shelley loved this child intensely, and sat by his bedside for sixty hours without taking rest.  He was now practically childless; and his grief found expression in many of his poems, especially in the fragment headed “Roma, Roma, Roma! non e piu com’ era prima.”  William was buried in the Protestant cemetery, of which Shelley had written a description to Peacock in the previous December.  “The English burying-place is a green slope near the walls, under the pyramidal tomb of Cestius, and is, I think, the most beautiful and solemn cemetery I ever beheld.  To see the sun shining on its bright grass, fresh, when we first visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep.  Such is the human mind, and so it peoples with its wishes vacancy and oblivion.”

Escaping from the scene of so much sorrow, they established themselves at the Villa Valsovano, near Leghorn.  Here Shelley began and finished “The Cenci” at the instance of his wife, who rightly thought that he undervalued his own powers as a dramatic poet.  The supposed portrait of Beatrice in the Barberini Palace had powerfully affected his imagination, and he fancied that her story would form the fitting subject for a tragedy.  It is fortunate for English literature that the real facts of that domestic drama, as recently published by Signor Bertolotti, were then involved in a tissue of romance and legend.  During this summer he saw a great deal of the Gisborne family.  Mrs. Gisborne’s son by a previous marriage, Henry Reveley, was an engineer, and Shelley conceived a project of helping him build a steamer which should ply between Leghorn and Marseilles.  He was to supply the funds, and the pecuniary profit was to be shared by the Gisborne family.  The scheme eventually fell through, though Shelley spent a good deal of money upon it; and its only importance is the additional light it throws upon his public and private benevolence.  From Leghorn the Shelleys removed in the autumn to Florence, where, on the 12th of November, the present Sir Percy Florence Shelley was born.  Here Shelley wrote the last act of “Prometheus Unbound”, which, though the finest portion of that unique drama, seems to have been an afterthought.  In the Cascine outside Florence he also composed the “Ode to the West Wind”, the most symmetrically perfect as well as the most impassioned of his minor lyrics.  He spent much time in the galleries, made notes upon the principal antique statues, and formed a plan of systematic art-study.  The climate, however, disagreed with him, and in the month of January, 1820, they took up their abode at Pisa.