Mary also returned to the Vatican; she and
Bysshe had been there in March 1819. And now once again, in 1843, she went to
the Sistine Chapel to see the ceiling paintings of Michelangelo. They have, she
writes, that simple grandeur that Michael
Angelo [sic] alone could confer on a single
figure, making it complete in itself—enthroned in majesty—reigning over the
souls of men.[1]
Then it was on south to Naples, about 135
miles down the western coast of Italy. There, she would again see the
ruins of Pompeii. A greater extent of the
city has been dug out, she writes, and
laid open since I was there before [December 1818], so that it has now much more the appearance of a town of the dead.
You may ramble about and lose yourself in the many streets.[2]
“A town of the dead.”
Mary does not say so, but she must have had
this feeling in Rome itself—where lay the remains of her husband, her children.
Indeed, every place she visited in these journeys—in Germany, in Switzerland,
in Italy—must have seemed to her entirely haunted by ghosts of Bysshe, of her
youth (and health), of the hope that once reigned in her life, only to sink in a
storm-ravaged boat off the coast of Viareggio.
Rambles ends in Naples, ends with these comments: … it is a joy … to see the calm sea spread out at our feet, as we look
over the bay of Naples—while above us bends a sky—in whose pure depths
ship-like clouds glide—and the moon hangs luminous, a pendant sphere of silver
fire.[3]
And thus ends Mary Shelley’s Rambles in Germany and Italy, 1843—the
final sentence in the final book she would write. A quarter-century earlier her
career had begun with a travel book, History
of a Six-Weeks Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland,
1817, a year before Frankenstein. And
she ended with another travel book, an account that tells of her return to the
places that she had adored, the places that had shattered her heart.
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