The Gulf of Poets
On the eastern shore of the Gulf of La Spezia, Lerici is an elegant seaside town with colourful houses along a small harbour full of boats, dominated by a massive castle of the thirteenth century, built by the Pisans and enlarged by the Genoese, which houses a museum of paleontology with dinosaur footprints. The gulf is known as the "Golfo dei Poeti", the Gulf of Poets, a name coined in the early twentieth century by the writer Sem Benelli to recall the great writers who lived or stayed here: above all the English Romantic poets Percy Bysshe Shelley, who lived in 1822 with his wife Mary, the author of "Frankenstein", in Villa Magni in the nearby village of San Terenzo, and drowned in a storm while sailing back from Livorno, and Lord Byron; later also D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and many others.
A few kilometres south, at the end of a winding road, Tellaro is a tiny fishing village, one of the "Borghi più belli d'Italia", built on a rocky spur over the sea, with tall pastel-coloured houses, narrow lanes, stairways and the pink church of San Giorgio facing the water. According to a famous legend, one night pirates were approaching the sleeping village, when a giant octopus climbed up the bell tower and rang the bell with its tentacles, waking the inhabitants and saving the village; still today an octopus festival recalls the story. The writer Mario Soldati lived in Tellaro and loved it. Between Lerici and Tellaro, the beaches of Fiascherino are among the most beautiful of the gulf.
Tip: walk along the seafront from Lerici to San Terenzo; in Tellaro, park at the entrance of the village and walk down.
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