Lord Byron

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Copy (recently vandalized) of the statue of Byron by Bertel Thorvaldsen
(Trinity College Library, Cambridge, 1829)
Villa Borghese gardens
Rome, May 2012

“O Rome! my country! city of the soul! The orphans of the heart must turn to thee, Lone mother of dead empires! and control In their shut breasts their petty misery. What are our woes and sufferance? Come and see The cypress, hear the owl, and plod your way O'er steps of broken thrones and temples, Ye! Whose agonies are evils of a day— A world is at our feet as fragile as our clay.”

(Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV, Stanza LXXVIII)