1. Letter to F.T. Palgrave, Rome 21 June, 1849. The Correspondence of Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. by Frederick L. Mulhauser, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957), I, p. 260. [Hereafter CAHC.] Clough went in person to Mazzini to obtain permission to view certain collections that had been closed during the siege. Palgrave’s father had written the Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy (1842), published by John Murray.
2. Handbook for Travellers in Central Italy, including the Papal States, Rome, and the Cities of Etruria (London: John Murray, 1843), p. 296. See James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’ 1800–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. 119–25. The preface to Murray’s third edition, which included poetic extracts, promised increased enjoyment ‘knowing how much the perusal of [such extracts] on the spot, where the works themselves are not to be procured, will enhance the interest of seeing the objects described’, A Handbook for Travellers on the Continent (London: Murray, 1942), no page number. I discuss the notion of being ‘on the spot’ at length in my first chapter.
3. William Hazlitt, ‘Byron and Wordsworth’, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt ed. by P.P. Howe (London and Toronto: J.M. Dent, 1932), vol. 20, p. 156. I discuss this further in Chapter 1. The notion of treading historically overburdened or haunted places is itself a classical commonplace, so that in Byron there is an anxiety about responding authentically to places which recall earlier writers who have already worried about the ghosts of history. See, for example, Cicero’s description of Athens in De finibus, V, ii: ‘quacumque enim ingredimur, in aliqua historia vestigium ponimus’ [‘wherever we go we tread historic ground’], Cicero: De finibus Bonorum et Malorum, translated by H. Rackham (London: Heinemann, 1914), pp. 396–7. I am indebted to Andrew Nicholson for drawing my attention to this passage.
4. ‘An Italian Carnival’ (1823), Lord Byron: The Complete Miscellaneous Prose, ed. by Andrew Nicholson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 190–1.
5. The literature of this encounter is vast, but important summarising collections of essays begin with William E. Mallory and Paul Simpson Housley (eds), Geography and Literature: A Meeting of the Disciplines (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1987).