… We sailed from the town of Como to a tract of country called the Tremezina, and saw the various aspects presented by that part of the lake. The mountains between Como and that village, or rather cluster of villages, are covered on high with chestnut forests (the eating chestnuts, on which the inhabitants of the country subsist in time of scarcity), which sometimes descend to the very verge of the lake, overhanging it with their hoary branches. But usually the immediate border of this shore is composed of laurel-trees, and bay, and myrtle, and wild fig-trees, and olives which grow in the crevices of the rocks, and overhang the caverns, and shadow the deep glens, which are filled with the flashing light of the waterfalls. Other flowering shrubs, which I cannot name, grow there also. On high, the towers of village churches are seen white among the dark forests. Beyond, on the opposite shore, which faces the south, the mountains descend less precipitously to the lake, and although they are much higher, and some covered with perpetual snow, there intervenes between them and the lake a range of lower hills, which have glens and rifts opening to the other, such as I should fancy the abysses of Ida or Parnassus. Here are plantations of olive, and orange, and lemon trees, which are now so loaded with fruit, that there is more fruit than leaves — and vineyards. Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley No. 294. To Thomas Love Peacock Milan, April 20, 1818. https://archive.org/details/lettersofpercyby0000shel/page/593/mode/1up

Vintage Postcard with photograph of 'Tremezzina Bay Como Lake'. From an elevated outlook, the view is down on the lake and towards high mountains beyond the blue and silvery water surface. In the foreground a green island and peninsula with small villages. Source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tremezzina_Bay_Como_Lake_of_Italy.jpg

Romantic Landscapes (31)
#PBShelley #TLPeacock #LakeComo #RomanticLandscapes

Visitors from the North reaching #Italy as place of longing likely first see the lakes of upper Italy, here Percy Bysshe Shelley describes the landscape of Lake Como during his travel 1818. It is spring in Lombardy.

The woods are roaring in the gale, That whirls their fading leaves afar; The crescent moon is cold and pale, And swiftly sinks the evening star. High on this mossy bank reclined I listen to the eddying wind, While Thames impels, with sinuous flow, His silent-rolling stream below; And darkly waves the giant oak, That broad, above, its stature rears; On whose young strength innocuous broke The storms of unrecorded years. Thomas Love Peacock from ‘The Genius of the Thames‘ https://ia601608.us.archive.org/35/items/geniusthamesaly00peacgoog/geniusthamesaly00peacgoog.pdf

Romantic Landscapes (14.1/n)
#TLPeacock #RomanticLandscapes

Less fine weather & autumnal scenery of the Thames occasion a more dramatic onset of a long poem by T.L. Peacock. But, all that might be a mere fabric of his fancy.

#RomanticLandscapes #Colosseo 'changed by time into the image of an amphitheatre of rocky hills overgrown by the wild olive, the myrtle, and the fig-tree, and threaded by little paths, which wind among its ruined stairs and immeasurable galleries'
in Letter to #TLPeacock by #PBShelley Dec 22 1818