'Oh Rome! My Country! City of the Soul!'

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Statue of Lord Byron, Villa Borghese

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Exactly 200 years ago, on April 19th 1824,  Byron, the great Romantic poet and peer, died in the Greek city of Missolonghi. He was thirty-six years old.

Since 1959, a statue of the poet, a copy of the work in Trinity College Cambridge (Byron’s alma mater), has stood in Villa Borghese. The original statue (1831-4) was carved by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (c. 1770-1844), who spent most of his professional life in Rome.

The broken column represents a life cut short, while the owl is a symbol of Minerva, the Greek goddess of wisdom. Byron was originally depicted with a pen in his right hand and a book in his left. 

The pedestal is inscribed with lines from Byron's long narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-18): 

Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!
  The orphans of the heart must turn to thee,
  Lone mother of dead empires! and control
  In their shut breasts their petty misery.
  What are our woes and sufferance? Come and see       
  The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way
  O’er steps of broken thrones and temples, ye!
  Whose agonies are evils of a day--
A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.
(IV: LXXXVIII).

But I have lived, and have not lived in vain:
  My mind may lose its force, my blood its fire,
  And my frame perish even in conquering pain;     
  But there is that within me which shall tire
  Torture and Time, and breathe when I expire;
  Something unearthly, which they deem not of,
  Like the remember’d tone of a mute lyre,
  Shall on their soften’d spirits sink, and move  
In hearts all rocky now the late remorse of love.
(IV: CXXXVII)

......Fair Italy!
Thou art the Garden of the World, the Home
Of all Art yields, and Nature can decree;
(IV: XXVI)

The pedestal also sports an inscription in Italian: Questo monumento / replica dell’opera di Thorvaldsen / al Trinity College di Cambridge / fu qui voluto / da ammiratori italiani inglesi e americani / per ricordare il Poeta / che amo’ l’Italia e la libertà (This monument, a replica of the work of Thorvaldsen in Trinity College, Cambridge, was wanted here by Italian, English and American admirers to remember the Poet who loved Italy and liberty). 

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Statue of Lord Byron

Statue of Lord Byron, Villa Borghese