The Exile in Search of Refuge: Lines written among the Euganean Hills

Abstract

Lines written among the Euganean Hills is the first major poem which Shelley wrote in Italy: it was composed at Este in October 1818, but not finalised until December of that year (Reiman 1962: 404 n2). Shelley, thanks to Byron, had taken up lodgings at I Capuccini, an old villa in the Euganean Hills (i Colli Euganei), not far from Arquà where Petrarch spent his last years. At Este in September, Shelley had succeeded in writing the first Act of Prometheus Unbound and had also begun to write Julian and Maddalo: neither of these poems was to be completed until the following year. Other works of note in the early months of residence were the translation of Plato’s Symposium together with A Discourse on the Manners of the Antient Greeks Relative to the Subject of Love and a brief essay ‘On Love’, and the completion of Rosalind and Helen, which he had begun at Marlow in the previous year. These tasks, undertaken at Bagni di Lucca, a fashionable spa in the peaceful surroundings of the Tuscan hills, were ways of coping with a sudden loss of inspiration.¹