Vallombrosa Visited, 1638–1851

Abstract

How does literature bestow associations on a place, and why do readers believe they can derive value from visiting a place with literature in mind? These journeys are not made simply to preserve literary memory, readers need only reopen their book for that, so what is the effect of these attempts to tie the literary to the historical place? And how does this manifest itself in the accounts visitors write about their experience? I look for answers to these questions through a specific example: the abbey of Vallombrosa, which features in a much-admired simile in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1674). The abbey’s growing popularity with literary tourists in the eighteenth century was supported by two historical factors: the growth of travel to Italy, first in the Grand Tour then in mass tourism after Waterloo; and the increasingly author-centered appreciations of Milton’s epic. In the first part I establish how and why the abbey became a site of literary pilgrimage, and in the second I examine authors’ reactions to visiting Vallombrosa in the decades before and after the continental wars; the authors considered include William Beckford, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The third part considers the response of William Wordsworth, who tried to go to Vallombrosa once, failed, wrote a poem in his disappointment, and then visited seventeen years later. The poetry and prose published by visitors to Vallombrosa display a varied but consistent sense that literary memory and physical fact cannot easily coalesce: something must be effaced.