Book launch "Vita e leggenda di Allegra" by Giulia Melandri

We are pleased to invite you to the book launch of Vita e leggenda di Allegra, figlia di Lord Byron e nipote di Mary Shelley (Il Ponte Vecchio, 2021) by Giulia Melandri on Wednesday 20 April at 5pm.

Admission is allowed with the normal museum entrance ticket and booking, although not required, is recommended due to the limited number of seats (write to info@ksh.roma.it).

The book Vita e leggenda di Allegra (Life and Legend of Allegra) tells the story of the illegitimate daughter of Lord Byron and Claire Clairmont, from her birth in England until her death. This book tries to unravel the various events of the little Byron girl, her arrival in Italy in 1818 in Venice, her stay in Ravenna, and in particular the author has focused on her time in Romagna. The author has particularly focused on the period she spent in the convent of S. Giovanni Battista in Bagnacavallo, a small town not far from Ravenna, where Allegra spent the last months of her life, cared for by the Capuchin Poor Clare nuns who took care of her. In this book, through letters and unpublished documents found in the Manfrediana library in Faenza (in the province of Ravenna), fragment by fragment, the author traces back Allegra's short life.

Giulia Melandri was born in 1980 in Villanova di Bagnacavallo, a small rural town in the Bagnacavallo countryside. She graduated in Literature and Cultural Heritage at the Alma Mater Studiorum in Bologna and is very proud of her origins; she wrote her degree thesis on the Ecomuseo delle Erbe palustri, located in her home town. She has lived for years with her husband and children in Faenza. Passionate about archaeology and history since she was a child, after working for several years in some primary schools, she finally devoted herself to one of her passions, archive research. An avid reader since childhood, after becoming interested in the story of Allegra Byron, she decided to delve deeper into the subject and, finding unpublished documents, she decided to write this biography.