Lamartine in Livorno

“Why do you leap upon the foaming beach,
Waves in which no wind has carved furrows?
Why do you stir your steaming foam
In light swirls?
Why do you swing your foreheads that the dawn dries,
Forests, that rumble before the hour of waking?
Why from your branches you scatter like rain
Those silent tears with which they bathed you at night?
Why do you raise, oh flowers, your full chalices,
like a bowed brow that love lifts?
Why in the damp shade exhale these first ones
Perfumes that the day breathes?”

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869), French writer, historian and politician, author of Poetic Meditations, among other things, had cousins ​​in Livorno and came to visit them. Once again it is Pietro Vigo who brings us his words.

“I lived near Livorno in the Palmieri villa on the Montenero road; to the left I saw the wooded peaks of the Monti di Limone, to the right the sea, facing Montenero. On the summit of this cape, leaning against the rock and green oaks, a church rises like a Greek temple with a view of the sea, and it is a pilgrimage for the castaways who escaped the storms by vows raised to the star of…