On the 14th June, 1817, Byron wrote to Murray again, this time from “the banks of the Brenta, a few miles from Venice, where I have colonized for six months to come.” He was again in Venice in 1818 and 1819, and he wrote, “I transport my horse to the Lido bordering the Adriatic (where the fort is), so that I get a gallop of some miles daily along the strip of beach which reaches to Malamocco.” At this period he was occupying the centre of the three Mocenigo Palaces, on the Grand Canal.
Moore met Byron in Venice in 1819, and he describes the five or six days they spent together here. He found Byron with whiskers, and fuller both in face and person than when he had seen him last, and leading anything but a reputable life. In Venice portions of _Manfred_, _Childe Harold_, and _Don Juan_ were written.
Bakers and poets, in Venice, seem to have a mutual attraction, for there are men still living here who remember Gautier when he was a lodger over the baker’s shop in the Campo S. Moisè, on the left-hand side, and opposite the corner of the church, as one goes towards the Square of St. Mark. His landlord, like Byron’s, was a Merchant of Venice in bread and cakes, in a retail way; and the establishment is still to be seen on the same spot, its window filled with the staff of life of all sizes and in every shape, some of the latter often fantastic.
The gondolas of Venice have frequently been compared to hearses, but Shelley likened them to “moths, of which a coffin might have been the chrysalis.” Clara Shelley, a daughter of the poet, died “at an inn” in Venice in 1818, and “she sleeps on bleak Lido, near Venetian seas.”
In _Julian and Maddalo_, written in 1818, Shelley tells us how he--
“ ... rode one evening with Count Maddalo Upon the bank of sand which breaks the flow Of Adria towards Venice: a bare strand Of hillocks, heaped from ever-shifting sand, Matted with thistles and amphibious weeds, Such as from earth’s embrace the salt ooze breeds, Is this; an uninhabited sea-side, Which the lone fisher, when his nets are dried, Abandons; and no other object breaks The waste, but one dwarf tree and some few stakes, Broken and unrepaired, and the tide makes A narrow space of level sand thereon, Where ’twas our wont to ride while day went down. This ride was my delight.”