I went to Europe for a month and lost a lot of words and sentences, but they are coming back … slowly. I saw lots of blues, the Limmat in Zürich; the Zürichsee, Lake Zug, Lake Luzern, Lake Lugano, (it should be pointed out that Switzerland is the ‘ursprung’ of blue in Europe – the Rhine, Rhone, Aare, Inn, and Ticino all originate in Swiss mountains before descending all over Europe); the Mediterranean (Adriatic and Ligurian), the ‘Gulfi di Poeti’, and finally, in Germany, the Leine. In Venice, the blue was more of a sludgy green, littered with flotsam, but in Liguria, the sea was shockingly bright and blue, as if made for postcards and bathing. I did not, like Byron, swim across the Gulf of La Spezia, but I wish I had.
Incidentally, Shelley drowned in the Ligurian Sea, just after seeing his Doppelgänger, and just before his 30th birthday in a boat he had or had not named in honor of Byron – a gem from Wikipedia on the competition of poets:
On 8 July 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while sailing back from Livorno to Lerici in his schooner, Don Juan. Shelley claimed to have met his Doppelgänger, foreboding his own death. He was returning from having set up The Liberal with the newly arrived Leigh Hunt. The name “Don Juan”, a compliment to Byron, was chosen by Edward John Trelawny, a member of the Shelley-Byron Pisan circle. However, according to Mary Shelley’s testimony, Shelley changed it to “Ariel“. This annoyed Byron, who forced the painting of the words “Don Juan” on the mainsail. This offended the Shelleys, who felt that the boat was made to look much like a coal barge. The vessel, an open boat was custom-built in Genoa for Shelley. It did not capsize but sank; Mary Shelley declared in her “Note on Poems of 1822″ (1839) that the design had a defect and that the boat was never seaworthy. In fact the boat was seaworthy, the sinking was due to the storm and poor seamanship of the three on board.[7]
