Winner of the Elma Dangerfield Prize 2018 Byron in Italy – Venetian debauchery, Roman sight-seeing, revolution, horse-riding and swimming, sword-brandishing and pistol-shooting, the poet’s ‘last attachment’ – forms part of the fabric of Romantic mythology. Yet Byron’s time in Italy was crucial to his development as a writer, to Italy’s sense of itself as a nation, to Europe’s perceptions of national identity and to the evolution of Romanticism across Europe. In this volume, Byron scholars from Britain, Europe and beyond re-assess the topic of ‘Byron and Italy’ in all its richness and complexity. They consider Byron’s relationship to Italian literature, people, geography, art, religion and politics, and discuss his navigations between British and Italian identities.

Lord Byron's Life in Italy is an English translation of Vie de Lord Byron en Italie by Byron's Italian friend Teresa Guiccioli, the manuscript of which has lain in Ravenna since the early 1880s, and which has never-been published, or even read except by a small number of scholars. Teresa Guiccioli was the poet's last mistress, his liaison with whom was of longer duration than any other. They met in 1819, and their relationship lasted until he left Italy for Greece in 1823. Persecuted by the authorities because of the friendship with such a dangerous man, Teresa's family had to move from Ravenna to Pisa and finally to Genoa. Teresa knew Byron better, probably, than any other person, and her fresh and original account of his life has been unknown for too long. This superb translation, with elaborate introduction and notes, fills a long-acknowledged gap in studies of Byron. Michael Rees is a past joint chair of the Byron Society. Peter Cochran is the editor of the Newstead Abbey Byron Society Review.

Byron and Italy tackles a subject to which no book has been devoted exclusively since the early 1940s. Peter Cochran writes not just about Byron’s relationships with Italian literature, not just about his relationships with Italian women, and not just about his relationship with Italian politics. He writes about Byron’s relationship with Italy as a whole, seeing the poet’s sojourn in Italy as a vain attempt to forge a new identity for himself. Drawing on a wide range of up-to-date research, including his own as editor of Teresa Guiccioli’s Lord Byron’s Life in Italy and the diary of John Cam Hobhouse, Cochran traces numerous threads of evidence showing how the critical reception Byron’s poetry received from Italian critics gave him a new sense of self-worth, and how his experience of Italian Carnival, and of the Italian mock-heroic tradition in verse, gave him a new idea of who he was, and of what poetry was about. Among much else, the book includes new material on the Carbonari and on Byron’s reading of Ugo Foscolo, and an appendix containing translations of all known Italian and Austrian police-reports on Byron and his entourage.

Fiona MacCarthy makes a breakthrough in interpreting Byron's life and poetry drawing on John Murray's world-famous archive. She brings a fresh eye to his early years: his childhood in Scotland, embattled relations with his mother, the effect of his deformed foot on his development. She traces his early travels in the Mediterranean and the East, throwing light on his relationships with adolescent boys - a hidden subject in earlier biographies. While paying due attention to the compelling tragicomedy of Byron's marriage, his incestuous love for his half-sister Augusta and the clamorous attention of his female fans, she gives a new importance to his close male friendships, in particular that with his publisher John Murray. She tells the full story of their famous disagreement, ending as a rift between them as Byron's poetry became more recklessly controversial. Byron was a celebrity in his own lifetime, becoming a 'superstar' in 1812, after the publication of Childe Harold. The Byron legend grew to unprecedented proportions after his death in the Greek War of Independence at the age of thirty-six. The problem for a biographer is sifting the truth from the sentimental, the self-serving and the spurious. Fiona MacCarthy has overcome this to produce an immaculately researched biography, which is also her refreshing personal view.