
The
people included here were either born in Britain, died in Britain,
became British citizens, became Prime Minister of Britain or ascended
the British throne. |
Italy |
Italy's
climate, history, culture and landscape has always attracted artistic
people, and during the 19th century it became a fashionable summer
destination and often chosen domicile for many writers and poets
including some of England's greatest: Keats, Byron, Shelley and
Browning. Keats and Shelley who both died in Italy are buried in
the Protestant cemetery in Rome.

Thou
Paradise of exiles, Italy!
Shelley - Julian and Maddalo (1818)
Italia! oh Italia! thou who hast
The fatal gift of beauty.
Byron - Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1818)
Italy, my Italy!
Queen Mary's saying serves for me -
(When fortune's malice lost her Calais) -
Open
my heart and you will see
Graved inside of it, 'Italy'.
Browning - De Gustibus (1855)
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Composers |
Born
in Lancashire in 1902, from 1949
William Walton lived on the island of Ischia in the Bay
of Naples. He died there in 1983, at his home La
Mortella, where his ashes were scattered in the garden he and
his wife had created.
William Walton

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Explorers
and Adventurers |
Born
in Genoa in 1450 the navigator Giovanni Caboto moved to England and
settled in the port of Bristol under the Anglicised name of John
Cabot. In 1497 he set out from
England in search of a route to Asia - via the Northwest Passage round
Canada - but instead discovered North America becoming the first European
since the Vikings to set foot on the continent and "claiming"
the land for his patron, Henry
VII of England. Returning to England he set out again on a second
voyage in 1498 but never returned, dying somewhere at sea.
Richard Francis Burton died in 1890 in Trieste (then in the Austrian
Empire). Born in Devon in 1821, Burton set out with John Hanning Speke
in 1856 to find the source of the Nile. In 1858 they became the first
Europeans to reach Lake Tanganyika but Burton, suffering from malaria,
had to turn back and it was Speke travelling on alone who discovered
the river's source which he named Lake Victoria. Burton is buried
in Mortlake in London.
Richard Francis Burton

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Famous
People |
Born
in Abbots Langley,
Hertfordshire in 1100, Nicholas
Breakspear was
the only Englishman ever to become Pope when he was elected as Adrian
IV in 1154. He died in office in 1159 at
Anagni near Rome.
The
nursing pioneer Florence
Nightingale was born in 1820 in Florence, the city after which
she was
named.
Florence
Nightingale
Florence
Nightingale

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Royal
Consorts and Heirs |
House of Stuart |
Mary
of Modena, who would become the second
wife of James
II in 1673, was born at Modena in 1658. She was Queen until
the Glorious
Revolution in 1688 when she was forced with her husband
into exile in France where they would spend the rest of their
lives. James II died there in 1701 and Mary in 1718. She is
buried at Chaillot.
Mary
of Modena
Glorious Revolution
The
Old PretenderJames
Francis Edward Stuart died in 1766 in exile in Rome.
He was Mary of Modena's only child with James
II.
Born at St
James's Palace
in London in 1688 his mother had to flee with him to France
later that year when the king was forced into exile during the
Glorious
Revolution.
On his father's death in 1701 James Stuart proclaimed himself
James III, and would have been heir to the throne on the death
of his half-sister Queen Anne
in 1714, but he refused to renounce his Catholicism and so was
excluded from the succession. After several failed attempts
at claiming the crown, including a major rebellion in 1715,
he settled in Italy, passing the mantle of the Jacobite
cause to his son Charles Stuart.
James Stuart is buried with his two sons (Charles
Edward and Henry
Benedict) in the crypt of St Peter's Basilica.
They
were the last of the Stuart royal line.
James
Francis
Charles
Edward
Henry
Benedict
Glorious Revolution
Jacobite Cause
James
Stuart's eldest son, the Young Pretender
Charles
Edward Stuart, was born in Rome
in 1720.
Bonnie Prince Charlie became the new hope for the Jacobite
cause and the rebellion of 1745 came closer to
claiming the crown than
his father
had thirty years earlier. After initial successes the rebellion
was finally put down at the decisive Battle
of Culloden in Scotland in 1746,
effectively ending the prospects of the Stuart royal line of
ever returning to the throne. Charles Stuart escaped the battle
and with the help of Flora Macdonald,
fled back to the continent where he eventually settled, like
his father, in Italy.
He died in Rome in 1788 and is buried with his father and younger
brother Henry
Benedict in the crypt of St Peter's Basilica.
They
were the last of the Stuart royal line.
James
Francis
Charles
Edward
Henry
Benedict
Glorious Revolution
Jacobite Cause

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|
Writers
and Poets |
John
Keats left Britain for Italy in 1820 to alleviate the tuberculosis
he was suffering from. He died the following year at 26
Piazza di Spagna, the house where he was staying at the foot of
the Spanish Steps in Rome. He was buried at the Protestant cemetery
in the city, where the following year Shelley's ashes would also be
interred.
John
Keats
John Keats website

Aye on the shores of darkness there is light,
And precipices show untrodden green,
There is a budding morrow in midnight,
There is a triple sight in blindness keen.
To Homer (1818)
Sometimes eagle's wings,
Unseen before by gods or wondering men,
Darkened the place.
Hyperion: A Fragment (1820)
Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
(His own epitath inscribed on his gravestone, 1821)
Percy
Shelley drowned at sea off Livorno in 1822 when his boat sunk
during a heavy storm whilst returning from visiting his friend Lord
Byron. His friends cremated his body on the beach, retrieving the
heart which would later be returned to the country he had left in
1818, and buried with his wife Mary in Hampshire.
Shelley's ashes were taken to Rome and interred at the Protestant
cemetery where Keats had been buried the previous year.
Percy
Shelley

I see the waves upon the shore,
Like light dissolved in star-showers, thrown.
Stanzas Written in Dejection, near Naples (1818)
A widow bird sat mourning for her love
Upon a wintry bough;
The frozen wind crept on above,
The freezing stream below.
Charles the First (1822)
The
poet Elizabeth
Barrett Browning lived in Italy from 1846 with her husband
Robert Browning whom she had married the previous year. They settled
first in Pisa and then, in 1847, in Florence, where she lived until
her death in 1861 and where she is buried.
Elizabeth
Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! - and if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850)
Her
husband Robert
Browning
died in Venice in 1889. He is buried in Westminster
Abbey.
Robert
Browning
Famous
people buried at Westminster Abbey

Oh, to be in England
Now that April's there,
And whoever wakes in England
Sees, some morning, unaware,
That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf
Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,
While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough
In England - now!
Home-Thoughts, from Abroad (1845)

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