Cinque Terre Webcam. The “lookout” on the Gulf of Poets
On the hills of the Gulf, the “Cinque Terre Webcam” offers the whole world the view of the landscapes loved by the English poets of the 1800s.
“[…] The place was too beautiful, it didn’t seem of this land, the sea at our feet, its incessant murmuring and roaring in our ears – everything invited the mind to meditate […] to become familiar with the unreal. “
With these words, the English writer Mary Shelley described her, the Gulf of La Spezia, where she lived with her husband in a house by the sea, from April to September 1822.
The villages overlooking the Gulf of La Spezia, also known as the “Gulf of Poets”, have inspired artists, writers and poets since ancient times.
One of the first to mention this stretch of the Ligurian coast was Dante who wrote in the “Divine Comedy“:
“Between Lerici and Turbia, the most deserted / the most hermit way is a staircase / towards the easy and open one”.
In this verse the poet compares the mountain of Purgatory, steep and steep, to the cliffs and cliffs between Lerici and the French village of La Turbie. (Purgatory III, 49-51)
In the 19th century, the villages of La Spezia were frequented by English poets such as Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his wife Mary, author of the novel “Frankenstein“. Legend has it that Byron, to go to greet his friend Mary Shelley, swam the gulf from Portovenere to Lerici where she was staying.
Also in this stretch of sea on July 8, 1822, Percy Shelley died due to the sinking of his boat “Ariel”, involved in a storm.
In 1820 the English architect James Hakewill, in collaboration with JMW Turner, created some engravings depicting the main Italian cities and a glimpse of the Gulf of La Spezia with the castle of Lerici, to illustrate his book “Pictoresque Tour of Italy“.
The denomination “Golfo dei Poeti” seems to be of recent creation, to be attributed to the Tuscan writer Sem Benelli (1877-1949) during his stay in Lerici.
On a hill between Lerici and La Spezia, the web portal MyVideoimage.com, specialized in videos and photos of Italian landscapes, has installed a video camera called “Cinque Terre Webcam“, which captures the stretch of sea that inspired artists and poets: Portovenere, the Palmaria Island and Tino Island with its lighthouse, the dam that delimits the Gulf of La Spezia and the cruise and cargo ships entering and leaving the port.
The panorama offered by the Cinque Terre webcam is probably very similar to what Mary Shelley admired during her excursions on the hills overlooking the village of Tellaro. The large cruise ships that today bring tourists to visit the Cinque Terre have replaced the nineteenth-century vessels but the landscape, with the obvious exception of the breakwater, built at the end of the nineteenth century, has probably remained unchanged.
