Linda Lappin

North of Rome, along the Via Cassia, lies a pocket of woodlands and wild ravines called Tuscia. During the 16th century, many noble Roman families built their summer residences here in the verdant Cimini Hills outlying the town of Viterbo. An esoteric itinerary connects three of these residences, each of which houses some of the most curious stonework produced by the Italian Renaissance: the fountains of Villa Lante in Bagnaia (1568-78), the Sacred Wood of Bomarzo (1552-1570), and the Papacqua Fountain in Soriano nel Cimino (1561).

Located within a few miles of each other, these sculptural composites are believed to have been designed by the same artists, including, possibly, Jacopo Vignola (1507-1573), and carved by the same craftsmen. The noblemen who commissioned them: Cardinal Giovan Francesco Gambara, Duke Vicino Orsini, and Cardinal Cristoforo Madruzzo, were neighbors, friends and, as a recent conspiracy theory holds, members of a neo-pagan society forced to go underground to avoid persecution. The orgiastic display of goddesses and satyrs sculpted in their gardens and fountains may be more than just a pagan dream in stone: these statues may represent pagan rituals or even fragments of an alchemical formula, testimony to the occult society to which these men may have belonged. Aspiring alchemists have interpreted them as stations along a journey of self-initiation that spiritual seekers in all eras may undertake, which is why I have come today on a pagan pilgrimage in Tuscia.

Driving down from Florence, I note the change in terrain after passing Orvieto. The rounded hills of Umbria, with their tidy vineyards, give way to the peculiar geological formation of Tuscia where erosion caused by dozens of streams feeding into the Tiber valley has slashed the landscape with deep chasms. Atop the cliffs are clustered medieval hamlets built of grey volcanic rock. Exiting the superhighway, I follow a winding road to Villa Lante where, on this summer morning, I am the only visitor.

The name “Villa” is misleading. No imposing villa was ever constructed here. Cardinal Gambara is said to have spent all his money on his garden, begun in 1568. He and his guests lodged in two small pavilions. Despite these modest accommodations, Villa Lante corresponds to the Renaissance ideal of a summer residence intended as a place of restoration through “garden magic.”

According to the architectural conventions of the period, every garden should evoke the Eternal Spring of the golden age. It should have a “bosco,” or wild area, and a landscaped area with fountains and statues which were to be arranged in a carefully studied scheme. The iconography of this scheme might include references to the owner’s name, career, coat-of-arms, or even to his horoscope. This was not done merely for aesthetic pleasure. It was believed that the proper placement of plants, fountains, and statues in harmony with the principles of astrology could influence human destiny. To visit such a garden was to interact with its magic on many levels, to undergo a transformation by means of enchantment in which all the senses participated.

Stepping inside the gates of Villa Lante, I am ensnared in a labyrinth of boxwood hedges. Their crisp foliage unleashes a balsamic scent as I wander through the coils all leading nowhere. For Cardinal Gambara, this seductive maze symbolized the imprisoning power of reason from which visitors were urged to escape by tackling the steep slopes leading straight up from the labyrinth. Here, in parterres arranged in tiers, I am met on every level with lush explosions of hydrangeas sprouting at the roots of century-old plane trees. Every level has its fountain, but the main one is the giant crayfish—Gambara’s heraldic symbol—planted midway up the slope, from which, between potent claws, gushes a narrow stream of water feeding all the fountains below.

This sparkling column of water is the quester’s guiding thread. By following it upwards, I am led to the source at the very top where a spring spurts out of the hillside through an Etruscan gorgon’s lips. In Gambara’s occult itinerary, once you have reached this spot you have returned to a state of grace enjoyed by human beings before the fall of man.

The first phase of my pilgrimage is complete. I have escaped from the labyrinth, and have been purified by the waters of life, but in order to proceed along the road to inner wisdom, I must now descend as low as I have just ascended. The next phase will take me to Bomarzo where I will descend into Vicino Orsini’s personal vision of hell, a park he named “the Sacred Wood.”

Recent weather conditions have contributed to making my visit an ordeal, as Vicino intended it to be. The narrow road to the park has been washed out by rainstorms, so I continue on foot. Like Villa Lante, the Sacred Wood defies the conventions of its time by not being placed in proximity to a villa or palace. Set midway down a gorge, distant from the Orsini Castle up in the town, it was not meant to be an embellishment to a princely home but an “experience” unto itself.

Near the entrance, a sphinx announces the enigmatic nature of this place. Further ahead, Cerebus, the three-headed guard dog of Hades, marks the threshold of the Underworld. In Villa Lante, the atmosphere shimmered with sunlight reflected on water in the dappled shade of enormous trees, but here it is gloomy; the park is in perennial shadow. Along twisting paths, I encounter bizarre creatures randomly carved from outcroppings of rock: giants in combat, an elephant trampling a soldier; a cave with gaping mouth, a lascivious mermaid. Blistered with lichen, half- hidden by ferns, these statues of grey tufa seem to have sprung up from the earth, shaken free by a cataclysm. Cryptic inscriptions throughout the park inform us that Vicino intended visitors to be shocked and stupefied by them.

After aimless wandering, I reach the center of the wood where two figures stand in stark relief: a paunchy Pluto, king of the Underworld, frowning from a mossy fountainhead, and Persephone, goddess of springtime, Pluto’s captive wife, lounging opposite. They hold the key to the mystery of Bomarzo, for they invite the visitor to re-enact a myth: Cybele’s search to rescue her daughter, Persephone, from the Underworld. In ancient religious rites, Persephone’s release from Hades symbolized the soul’s liberation, a second birth. By rambling through this park in Cybele’s footsteps, I have, according to Vicino’s secret plan, been symbolically reborn.

In Vicino’s “Sacred Wood” Persephone may be freed from the Underworld only after the seeker has lost his way in the forest, confronting sculpted images of terror, lust, and rage at every turn. These grotesque statues represent the darker side of the human psyche which must be transformed through the alchemical process before gold can be made, or spiritual regeneration attained.

An investigation of the woods outside the park sheds further light on the name Vicino chose for this place. The Sacred Wood borders an area known today as “Le Madonnelle,” hallowed by the Etruscans, later adopted as a sanctuary by the medieval cult of Mary. Climbing those slopes, I find Etruscan altars and grottos scattered amid the trees. The most impressive is a huge, cubic altar, perfectly oriented to the four points of the compass, where Etruscan priests once invoked woodland spirits. By enclosing part of this terrain and populating it with pagan figures, Vicino asserted his pagan affiliations and returned a corner of his estate to its previous gods.

Tomes have been written to explain how Renaissance noblemen like Vicino Orsini reconciled their Christian faith with their infatuation for pagan gods. Sublimely subversive among those gods was Pan, celebrated in an erotic, mysterious, and little-known sculpture of the period, the Papacqua fountain in the hill town of Soriano nel Cimino, the last stop in my journey.

Commissioned in 1561 by Cardinal Madruzzo for his palace, these twin fountains represent the cardinal’s double vision of the world. On one wall, Moses, sculpted in the fashion of the times, strikes a desert rock with his rod to release a jet of water. On the other, an Etruscan faun lies with her babies on a writhing mound of serpents and snails while a satyr, in an excited state, gazes down in rapture. The whole teeming spectacle is held up by Pan, god of Nature.

The life-giving water bubbling up in both fountains stems from the same mountain spring, but has been channeled through two separate faiths: the pagan, in which Pan and the Mother Goddess reign supreme, and the Judaeo-Christian heritage. In the concluding phase of initiation, the seeker is asked to unite these opposites, penetrate the outer forms and sip the water directly from its source.

I take a paper cup from my knapsack, fill it to the brim. Lifting it high, I toast Moses, Pan, and the Mother Goddess, thanking them for the wisdom they have conceded on this alchemical tour of Tuscia.

A Visit to the Witches of Montecchio

High Tuscia, a rugged terrain of woods and canyons nestled between Rome and Tuscany is well known as homeland to the mysterious Etruscans as well as the headquarters of a revolutionary secret society of the 16th century which practiced occultism and masked its anti-clerical and reformist agenda behind pagan symbols. The great villas and sculpture gardens of the area, with their symbolic statues, fountains, landscaping and iconography all bear testimony to the Tuscia’s occult connection. Few people know, however, that rougher forms of female magic were practiced in those woods in the long centuries following the decline of Etruscan culture up until relatively modern times. In the woods outlying Villa Lante, the 16th century garden of extraordinary fountains built by Cardinal Gambara, replete with pagan symbols of rebirth and regeneration -- there stands a wooded hill called Montecchio where wild women convened to dance around a fire, perform magic rites, and embrace winged beings. Local legend knows them as the Witches of Montecchio or as the Daughters of the Moon. On this day of Halloween, it seems fitting to pay a visit to their sacred spots.

For centuries this hill was considered taboo, maledetto, cursed, and thus avoided by hikers and chestnut or porcini gatherers so frequent elsewhere in these woods. Here on Montecchio only a hunter or two would venture, well-armed, in the boar season. A shadow seems to hang over the place - as it does in many similar sites I have visited in the Tuscia – such as the pagan altars just outside the Monster Park of Bomarzo, totally abandoned and enveloped by vines and scrub; or the strange cave dwellings of Corviano perched perpendicularly on towering cliffs, or the mouldering step pyramids thickly furred with moss hidden amid lonely hazelnut groves near Vitorchiano. Secluded, silent, luxuriantly overgrown, these woodland places stand so near to built up areas, highways, villages, all out of sight just over the next ridge. The hiker may take heart that the safe and familiar world is within reach and yet these eerie places of the Tuscia radiate a chilling isolation. Leaving my car by the roadside and stepping in amid the trees, I can feel myself entering a time warp.

The track runs steep up a grassy slope, weaving in among scrub, thorns, and waist high weeds that tear my clothes. Boar tracks riddle muddy patches where rain has collected.
Pink and purple flares of cyclamen stretch on for yards, poking up through grass and dead leaves. Here at night, under the moonlight, the daughters of the moon ran heedless, with hair streaming, through these branches up to the sacred plain at the very top of the hill. Here fire-blackened outcropping of rock indicate the site of their ancient bonfires, recently resuscitated, probably by boar hunters or by the curiosity seekers who have preceded me. Further along I find the sacred spot I have been seeking: the throne where the queen of the witches, or better, the high priestess ---presided. Her throne is a niche carved in cold stone atop a mossy mound of rock, earth, and lichen. It is not a place to sit – here she held court by lying down. The cross-shaped niche, reminiscent of an angel’s form with outspread wings, perfectly contains a supine human body – with lateral troughs at right angles just designed to hold your arms uplifted at the elbows. Local legend claims that this was the queen’s nuptial bed, where she embraced a great winged spirit who impressed the shape of his wings upon the stone. Or perhaps she merely lifted her arms in a ritual gesture, reaching up to the moon and stars and the shape of the troughs helped her maintain such an awkward position at length. Perhaps 9 months following this ritual embrace, in this niche she gave birth to a new daughter of the moon. Her throne may have been a place of sacrifice, an altar, or a place of healing or birthing. Candle stubs and melted blobs of wax on nearby stones show me that the place is still frequented at night.

Who were the witches of Montecchio? Historical findings indicate there was indeed a community of women living in these woods in the middle ages: a religious community of female hermits tolerated by the church. Local legend though brands them as witches, who however, practiced usually white magic, but on occasion ensorcelled the menfolk of their rivals, causing them to run out from their homes in the night to join the moon daughters in their revels.

Who knows if on this night of Halloween, they will return to this hill – either in the flesh as contemporary neophytes or as shades of an archaic past to celebrate the goddess of earth and moon and woodland who once reigned supreme in these parts. I touch a charred rock – still warm to touch – and am convinced tonight too here in this spot, orange flames will lick the jet black sky and around that flickering light and heat, a ring of wild women will be dancing till dawn.

Note: The sacred and pagan places of Tuscia have been a topic of my research for many years, and are featured in my novel The Etruscan (Wynkin deWorde, 2004) and in my forthcoming novel, Signatures in Stone, set in Bomarzo.

Obama & Michelle have paralyzed our city today with their arrival in Rome. Newspapers sing with praise and anecdotes soon to become legend.

You are the future, gushed one local administrator as Obama was led through Aquila’s devastated historical center. To which Obama, on whom the responsibility for the entire world’s well being and prosperity must weigh heavy, replied, in Italian, “Good Luck” Impossible not to be touched by Obama magic. Even my relationship with the local drycleaner has changed since he was elected.

The couple who run the shop, ex hippy – and perhaps ex- junkie, she in granny dresses and he with long hair and a motor cycle, used to glower at me when I entered the premises, worrying I might be a Bush supporter. Now they treat me with deference since they learned I am an Obama fan. “I cried when I saw he had actually won!” I confessed when asked back in November. “Of joy, I hope," she replied cautiously. Yesterday as I dropped off my husband’s favorite summer trousers for a clean at the outrageous price of eight euros, she greeted me triumphantly with: “He’s in Rome!” He being Obama, the only other topic of our usual conversations aside from tips for removing stains. Her eyes widened like a gleeful child's "Wouldn’t it be wonderful to meet him! He’s going to meet with the pope!” Then her face darkened, “ I just hope everything will be all right over there in Aquila, with the earthquakes and all!” Don’t we all.

7:45 on a Monday morning finds me waiting for the bus in the square outside the medieval gateway of a village in Central Italy, where I live part of the week. Waiting with me are cleaning ladies, farmhands, workmen, and a few older locals on their way to town. I make a point of saying good morning. Some reply; others don’t, but they all know who I am: La straniera. One of a handful of foreigners who have moved into their territory, buying up old houses nobody wanted at prices nobody local would pay. Attitudes towards foreigners, especially Americans, are always in flux in a village like this one, where the word itself “straniero” is interpreted in the narrowest sense. Even people from the village a mile down the road are considered as “outsiders.” That being the case, there is nothing I can do except wear this status with a smile. As an expat American, I am and will always be, an outsider here, although I have been living here for ten years, and for half that time, have been the owner of a house in the old village.
Across from the bus stop, a fountain splashes. The fountain was put there only a few months ago, replacing an implausible but “simpatico” Easter Island statue. That statue had been a gift to the village from Easter Island sculptors who had been invited here to demonstrate their sculpting technique, for, due to some curious coincidence in geological time, Easter Island and this village in Tuscia are both built on bedrock of the exact same volcanic stone. The statue was carved here from local stone by a family of Rapanui carvers. Initially, it was seen as a goodwill ambassador, linking this landlocked village with a remote Pacific island, connecting two peoples whose livelihoods depended on stone.

For eighteen years it stood outside the city gate. Children and tourists loved it; the local priest, perhaps disapproving of its pagan associations, did not. Over a decade, the openness to what it represented—a people of a different race, religion, and culture—gave way to suspicions. After years of grumbling, “That thing has nothing to do with us,” it was moved out of town. Its banishment makes me remember I am a guest here and could at any time receive similar treatment. Recent problems: unchecked immigration, unemployment, economic crisis have caused people to shut up their doors—both physically and metaphorically. Even here now there are burglaries. The local people and politicians have no doubt: the culprits are “foreigners.”

A group of men outside the café are staring at me. A woman, fiftyish, in a masculine hat, who carries a brief case, goes to work by bus, but comes back in a taxi, I must be an amusing spectacle, if not an outright provocation. Here few women work outside the home and unemployment is rife. What right have I, a foreigner, to have a job and what’s more – a job requiring a brief case rather than a broom and apron? Only penniless “nobodies” take the bus; everyone else drives to work; on the other hand, travelling by taxi is to their parsimonious minds, not only an unthinkable extravagance, but almost a sin. Between these two extremes, it is hard for them to place me, even though rain or shine, for the last ten years, they have seen me here at the bus stop, every Monday and Friday morning from September till June.

I know I am observed when I walk through the village. People note what I wear and what I buy and how much money I spend or don’t spend at the local shops. People note who I talk to on the street, especially if I speak to someone of the opposite sex. When friends come for dinner, when a workman comes for a repair, when my husband and I argue, there will be someone listening, or watching with nose pressed to the glass. The first thing I see in the morning when I open my door is my neighbor, leaning out her kitchen window, smoking the first cigarette of the day and peering into my kitchen. It’s up to me to say “good morning” first, before she ducks her head back inside. It is not that we have been singled out. It is the way of life here, the way of life in a village where everyone is related by blood or marriage to everybody else, except, of course, for “the outsiders.”

Negotiating these social relationships is one of the challenges of expat life. The other big challenge when your status changes from prolonged tourist to immigrant is living in another language twenty-four hours a day at work, at home, in your leisure time, and in emergencies. It has taken me years to reach the point where I can express myself in Italian in any situation comfortably, intimate or formal. It was tough at first: being a writer, being able to express myself in my native language articulately on any subject but deprived of this capacity in a country where I did not have the same control of the language. I felt that I ought to have the same command of Italian, and that if I didn’t I was a failure. I try to remember this now when teaching English to university students. That sense of inferiority is a self-inflicted handicap you have to let go of.

I still make mistakes and get tongue tied, and when I open my mouth to speak to a stranger, in a shop where they don’t know me, in an office, I sometimes still elicit a certain response in the person I address, which may vary from a slight frown to a scrunching up of their features, belying their anxiety. Other expats have told me they have experienced the same thing. This frown may vanish as the conversation continues, or it may linger. I sometimes wonder if this response is triggered by something I am projecting because I am shy about talking to strangers or worried about being understood. And when someone “foreign-looking” stops me on the street to ask me something, do I also unconsciously frame my face in this way? I do at times wear a “street face” I catch myself in—a hard “don’t mess with me” look I adopt when I have to walk alone in an area where I sense a threat. Yet I know how crushing it can be to see such an expression reflected in a stranger’s face simply because you asked him or her a question.

A shopkeeper I know in the village sometimes puts her fingers in her ears and wags her head from side to side to show tourists who have strayed into her shop that she can’t understand them when they try to ask for cheese or bread in English. That absurd gesture devastates, frustrates, or angers the receiver. It’s hard to remember that it is borne of her fear of difference, of otherness, an ancestral fear we all carry with us, a self-chosen burden.

The bus arrives; we all climb on. The ride to town reminds me why I love this place. Rolling hills dotted with sheep, ancient oaks, vineyards, a swatch of bright yellow—a field of mustard plants abloom in late winter; and a niche in a grotto with candles guttering before a rough icon of the Virgin. This is the old Italy, the quaint Italy, tradition-bound, where every old house and tower, cypress tree and winding gravel road are woven into a harmonious whole. Beyond those hills lies Bolsena Lake, and ridge after ridge of Etruscan tombs carved in cliffs and steeped in legends. It was this atmosphere, this spirit of place that inspired my first novel, The Etruscan, and now my more recent one, Signatures in Stone. And it is these very people riding with me on the bus, watching me from the corner of their eye, and the generations before them, who have made it that way, who have coaxed the fruits from the land and preserved its unmatched beauty. Travel writer Lawrence Durrell once said that people are an expression of their landscape. My fellow passengers are as hardy, rough, suspicious, as their remote Etruscan ancestors probably were, not only with outsiders, but also with each other, as I have learned to keep in mind.

A little story will illustrate this point. In return for a small favor, a neighbor invited me to drop by last week so that she could give me some fresh eggs. Here it is customary to make gifts of eggs as a gesture of good-neighborliness. Around seven p.m. I went to her house, just around the corner. The narrow cobbled street was deserted; the streetlights weren’t on and there was no one about. Answering the door, she whisked me inside by the elbow. “Come in quickly. Otherwise they’ll see us,” she warned. Inside, the woodstove was lit. There was an intense smell of chestnut pudding steaming on the stove. “They’ll be watching. They’ll be wanting some too, if they see me giving you some,” she said as she wrapped up the eggs in a sheaf of newspaper. I was only inside five minutes before she ushered me out again, with my packet tucked well out of sight. I was startled to see in a dimly lit window across the street, a face peeking out from behind a lace curtain: a long nose and two bright eyes had been observing the scene. The face retreated as I stared back. For the owner of that face, imagining what transaction had just taken place in the kitchen across the street was probably better than watching television.

Today the bus crowd is livelier than usual, almost like a mobile club house or a town hall, with everyone joining in the conversation. They are talking about the U.S. elections. Naturally, they all identify with the underdog, the dark horse, Obama. “Let’s hope he can solve all the problems. The war. The economy.” one woman says wistfully. I smile and nod. As we trundle past the banished Easter Island statue, I reflect that this victory, which has given hope to so many, perhaps depended partly upon one thing. Maybe enough people have begun to learn that “otherness” is just an illusion we can easily discard.

On January 13, 1923, George Ivanovic Gurdjieff, the much-discussed spiritual leader of the last century, publicly inaugurated his Study House, a refurbished airplane hangar erected on the grounds of the Prieure des Basse Loges, a former Carmelite monastery in Fontainebleau outside Paris which housed Gurdjieff’s Institute for the Harmonious Development of Man. Gaily decorated with arabesques, spread with rich, oriental carpets, furnished with a small fountain illuminated by multicolored lights, this exotic corner of the East transported to the environs of Paris exerted a magnetic attraction over a great number of intellectuals, writers, artists, dancers, musicians who flocked there to witness the extraordinary performances of Gurdjieff’s Sacred Dances and Movements, accompanied by stirring, melancholy piano music composed by Thomas deHartmann with the master Gurdjieff. Once open to the public, the Study House welcomed celebrities like Diaghliev and Frank Lloyd Wright, but just days before its official inauguration, another illustrious person had sat in the front row of the audience, wrapped in a fur coat, and watching the dancers intensely: Katherine Mansfield. This pioneer of the modernist short story and exquisite diarist spent the last three months of her life as Gurdjieff’s guest. Katherine did not live long enough to participate in the gala celebration of January 13th, for she had been buried the day before in the Cemetery of Fontainebleau- Avon after dying of a hemorrhage on January 9 at the age of 34.


Mansfield had come here after a long, sterile journey seeking health, which had begun in 1918, when she discovered she had tuberculosis. From that moment on, her life had been a restless pilgrimage, crisscrossing Europe on trains, accompanied by her companion Ida, separated most of the time from her husband, John Middleton Murry, looking for a better climate, a new cure, a home. But how had this writer from New Zealand, a little land with no history, ended up here knocking at Gurdjieff’s door?


This story had interested me for years – and my new novel, Katherine’s Wish, attempts to answer, in part, the question as to why she Mansfield went to Fontainebleau. I worked on this novel for many years – reading and re-reading Mansfield’s work, her letters and diaries, and those of her friends and associates, studying criticism of her stories, gathering historical information, sifting through unpublished articles, memoirs and hard-to-find resources, visiting places connected to her life – including the Prieure, where I managed to take a photograph of the interior while the building was being renovated a few years ago. At one point I became so saturated with content, it was imperative to do something with it all. I began with the idea of writing a screenplay, but then, after a pilgrimage to Fontainebleau, wrote an essay entitled “The Ghosts of Fontainebleau,” which was later published by the Southwest Review. Friends and editors suggested I turn that essay into a piece of fiction. It began as a short story, later nominated for the Pushcart prize, and then became a novel.


Katherine’s Wish closely follows the chronology of Mansfield’s life, explores her artistic and spiritual quest - for writing and spiritual concerns were always linked for Katherine Mansfield, as well as her most intense relationships, with Murry, Ida, and with DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, who appear as minor characters. There is an entire chapter devoted to Mansfield’s friendship with Viriginia Woolf. My technique has been to use some of Mansfield’s own techniques in my narrative, weaving ideas, themes, symbols from the stories, and moods and episodes from the diaries and letters, into a multi-layered fabric, true to the voice and spirit of Mansfield’s own writing. I have taken liberty to flesh out and re-imagine some scenes and events for which conflicting documentation exists, adhering to a sense of truth as a mosaic. A vivid, richly detailed slice of life from Mansfield’s brief and often tormented existence, Katherine’s Wish celebrates Mansfield’s deep love of life, which never abandoned her, and its final message is a life –affirming one of joy and of wholeness achieved.

For readers familiar with Mansfield’s life and writings, I hope they will enjoy the sense of “full immersion” I have tried to evoke. Those who have never read Mansfield or don’t know much about her life will, I believe, be caught up in her spell, and in the drama of her courageous struggle against time.



“Lappin’s achievement is to succeed where medicine failed, and through her words, give Mansfield ongoing life,” The Literary Review, Dec. 2008



“[Lappin’s] writing style, with its rhythm, flow, and sensual detail, richly evokes the significant social scene of a vanished era….Katherine’s Wish is first and foremost the compelling story of an artist fighting against time. Long after the last page, thoughts of her linger like an exotic scent.” Rain Taxi on line, Jan. 2009



“Capturing the latter part of Katherine’s life and world, the author brings vivid life to this novel, which reads like a literary biography of Katherine Mansfield
and her contemporaries.” - Tess Allegra, The Historical Novels Review, Nov. 2008





Free podcasts of Linda Lappin reading from Katherine’s Wish are available from Itunes:



phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=292957054

For centuries, the “Grand Tour” brought writers and artists down across Northern Europe to Italy. Among the great writers inspired by Italian antiquities, art treasures, and landscape were Montaigne, Goethe, Sterne, Dickens, John Keats, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and Edith Wharton. The itinerary of the Grand Tour touched the pulse points of Renaissance and Baroque culture: Venice, Florence, Rome, Naples — with a jaunt to the isle of Capri. Only the more adventurous headed further south, or to the wilder islands.


Among those wilder, windswept isles is the Maddalena Archipelago between Sardinia and Corsica. Sculpted in pink granite, these rough islands offered thrilling seascapes, choppy sailing, and few amenities. Yet in the 19th century, this spot welcomed an odd assortment of errant Englishmen straying from the prescribed routes of the Grand Tour. Among them was Daniel Roberts, poet and navy man, companion at arms of Admiral Nelson at the battle of Trafalgar, intimate friend of Shelley and Byron. After leaving the navy, Roberts settled down in this forlorn oasis of goatherds and fishermen. Here he could not only contemplate endless sunsets on the sea--- but also, surprisingly, consult one of the best- stocked poetry libraries in the Mediterranean.


The library was housed in the Villa Webber, built by James Webber, a wealthy London hatter who came to La Maddalena in the 1850's . Webber’s serendipitous arrival evokes the plots of both The Tempest and Robinson Crusoe. En route from Australia to London, he was shipwrecked off La Maddalena.. Safely ashore, he fell into a deep sleep, and the morning after found himself miraculously cured of all the ills, physical and moral, from which he had suffered for years. When his ship was repaired and ready to sail, he chose to stay behind.


Webber constructed a sumptuous villa in Moorish style on the cliffs facing Corsica. His pride were his art gallery — consisting of paintings of the Neapolitan school, and his poetry library - with hundreds of preciously- bound volumes by the great English, French, and Italian poets. The library soon became a local landmark. All travelers who dared make it down this far, such as the writer Speranza Von Schwartz, called on Webber at the Maddalena to spend a few hours in his library, while gale winds battered the windows. Webber was so jealous of his books, he refused to let his servants touch them and insisted on dusting them himself. Yet he welcomed those who came to study in his library.


Many myths have sprung up about the mysterious hatter. Was he only an eccentric merchant or perhaps a British spy? At his death, the artistic patrimony he collected was scattered and destroyed. The villa’s furnishings and paintings were carted away — all the books were lost. Today, stripped of its contents, Villa Webber stands concealed behind thick tangles of prickly pear, off limits to visitors - a relic of a former time when travelers braved tempestuous seas for the pleasure of a good book of poetry.