Lamartine

“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 that the dawn dries,

Forests, that rustle before waking up?

For from your branches you spread like rain

Those silent tears that bathed the night?

Why do you raise, oh flowers, your full goblets,

like bent brow that love lifts?

Why in the humid shade to 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 hill, leaning against the rock and green oaks, a church rises like a Greek temple with a view of the sea, and it is a pilgrimage for the castaways who escaped from the storms by the vows raised to the star of the sea. I liked this place so much that I often went up there. On the road 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 to look 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, caprice, and 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 these 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, the daughter of an arselle vendor, returned them 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.