Percy Bysshe Shelley, Letters from Naples

The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, 1792-1822, never returned to England after his second visit to Italy in  1818, which he travelled extensively and where he wrote several of his important poetical works (Ode to the West Wind). Here you can read a more detailed biography.

By Amelia Curran (1775-1847)

As every traveller in that time, P. B. Shelley has left a number of letters to friends, telling his experiences and thoughts in the places which he visited - Bologna, Ravenna, Florence, Pisa, Rome, Naples, and others. In a letter from Naples to a friend, he explained that "I keep no journal, and the only records of my voyage will be the letters I send you".

The poet wrote an  Ode to Naples, while these verses from the Ode to the West Wind

Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,	30
Lull'd by the coil of his crystàlline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiæ's bay...

hint to the Gulf of Pozzuoli and its islands.

Bacchus and Agathodaemon with Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii, House of the Centenary.

Now at Napoli, Museo Archeologico Nazionale

To have an idea of Shelley's impressions on the places, the people, the cultures he met in our region,  read both the letters from Naples - here and here -, where he tells of his visits to Pompeii, Paestum and the Vesuvius.

Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass

« Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, ‘and what is the use of a book,’ thought  Alice ‘without pictures or conversation?’ ».

So runs one of the most famous incipits in the Victorian  literature about the most famous little girl in her age. 

The hint to the need of "pictures" and "conversation" in books might lead us to think to a children book - and this is what Alice in Wonderland, 1865, is often supposed to be. But, though  full of pictures and conversation, Alice's kid jokes  get to the adult mind.
Lewis Carroll (Charles Dodgson, 1832-1898) was a mathematician and a university professor. He  wrote books like The Fifth Book of Euclid Treated Algebraically or Symbolic Logic, he invented mathematical and language games. Alice is not simply a scherzo on the fantastic adventures of a ten-years-old girl. Jokes were a serious matter to the author. To know more on this aspect of his activity, give a look at the Lewis Carroll Society of North America:  you will find as much mathematics and logic as fiction.

Consider Alice and its sequel Through the Looking Glass, 1872, weird cases and character list: a white rabbit wearing a waistcoat, obsessed by time, the girl Alice becoming disproportionately tall or short after having a cake or a drink (objects appear different to us as we change our viewpoint), Alice discussing with a parrot in a "queer-looking party" of birds and animals. The parrot states he is right because « ‘I am older than you, and must know better’... ».  Yet, Alice is a reflexive little girl, so she  « "would not allow without knowing how old it was, and, as the Lory positively refused to tell its age, there was no more to be said" »  (how to solve a problem if one or several data are missing?). Not to say of the puns. The Mouse about to tell Alice a tale says  « ‘Mine is a long and a sad tale!’ said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing. ‘It is a long tail, certainly,’ said Alice... ». 
I will stop here for the moment (the list is very long) and make a few considerations. Strange animals, illogical assertions. Alice is always the voice of logic, she faces the strange adventures feeling the strength of logical thinking. Whenever she renounces to rebut to absurdities, that is simply because she chooses to do that, she's too polite and she knows it would be no use.

*   *   *  

The chapter Advice from a Caterpillar is especially exemplar of the tone of the whole book: a queer character, a weird picture, a poem resembling an ancient ballad in the form, but quite absurd in the content, Alice challenged in her convictions.

                                                    Illustration by John Tenniel, 1820-1914

« ‘Who are you?’ said the Caterpillar.

This was not an encouraging opening for a conversation. Alice replied, rather shyly, ‘I— I hardly know, sir, just at present — at least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have been changed several times since then.’»

Then  « ‘What size do you want to be?’ »  it asked. In order to go back to her familiar height, the Catrpillar suggests Alice to eat a piece of mushroom: « ‘One side will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter’ ». But the mushroom "was perfectly round" so Alice "found this a very difficult question". 

... to be continued