Keats-Shelley House - Leigh Hunt

Leigh Hunt was born in 1784. His first collection of poems appeared in 1801. In 1808 he founded and edited The Examiner, the first of many journals he was to initiate. In 1813 he and his brother John were sentenced to two years' imprisonment for a libel in The Examiner on the Prince Regent. He was a lifelong supporter of the Romantic Movement in general and of Keats, Shelley and Byron in particular. His name was linked with Keats and Hazlitt in attacks on the so-called Cockney School. In his house in Hampstead he gathered together a seminal group of poets, writers and artists.

In his journal The Indicator he published in 1821 Keats's La Belle Dame Sans Merci, and in a journal founded jointly with Byron, The Liberal, appeared in 1822 works not only by himself but also those of Shelley and Byron. A first edition of The Liberal can be seen in the Severn Room.
Hunt arrived in Italy at the end of June 1822, together with his wife and five sons, at the invitation of Shelley and Byron. It was to welcome Hunt and his family that Shelley crossed to Livorno on 1 July . Leigh Hunt was present together with Byron and Trelawny when Shelley's body was burnt on the beach near Viareggio. Indeed it was Leigh Hunt who suggested that the words 'Cor Cordium' should be engraved on Shelley's tombstone.
He published many stories, plays and essays connected with or about Italy including ; The Story of Rimini, A Legend of Florence and Stories from Italian Poets. He died in 1859.

Axel Munthe 1857 - 1949
In 1881, at the age of 24, Axel Munthe learned of a terrible outbreak of Cholera in Naples and of an acute shortage of doctors to treat the sick. Recently qualified as a doctor he spent all his resources on medicine and took the first available transport to Naples where he worked against the disease for the next two years.
When the epidemic subsided Munthe decided to remain in Italy, settling in Rome where he continued to treat the poor in the then slum quarter of Trastevere. Friends found him lodgings at Piazza di Spagna, 26 but his daily routine took him out of Rome, towards Tivoli, to the Castle of Lunghezza which he used as a clinic.
One day, when leaving Lunghezza, he saw a bird caught in a wire fence. It was an owl with a broken wing. He put it in his breast pocket, returned to Rome, and installed the bird on his creeper-covered terrace at Piazza di Spagna, 26. After some months the bird was able to fly and Munthe took it back to Lunghezza to release it. He set off back to Rome but noticed a bird persistently fluttering behind his head as he drove. He slowed and the owl landed on his head. It remained with Munthe in Rome, living on the terrace for many years, until it died. When it died, Munthe buried it under his reception room window.
Munthe remained in Italy, becoming friends with the great Italian actress Eleonora Duse. He finally retired to Capri where he wrote his best-selling autobiography, The Story of San Michele (1929).