The Simplon Pass
Having heard plenty of horror stories in Switzerland about the terrible bandits who infest the pass, Byron and Hobhouse are well-prepared, with armed guards and an – apparently – savage dog. They are both relieved and (perhaps) a little disappointed that the journey has passed with nothing worse than the coachman stopping to show them the exact spot where English travellers just like them were robbed only the other day.
And so, like the Grand Tourists of former days, the two fall upon Italy with relish, filling their days with sightseeing, trips to the theatre and social calls. They make several visits to the Ambrosian Library, and the ever-precise and orderly Hobhouse expresses his surprise that such a magnificent archive should have no catalogue. The custodian,
… excused this to me by saying, “If there had been a catalogue the French would have pilled [robbed] us of our books as they did of our pictures – they would have known what to take”
Lucrezia’s hair.
Catalogue or no, Byron finds something which fascinates him deeply, and manages to fall a little in love. He is delighted by letters between Lucrezia Borgia, by then Duchess of Ferrara, and the Italian cardinal Pietro Bembo, “the prettiest love-letters in the world,” he calls them. And when he is shown a lock of Lucrezia’s hair, still golden after several centuries, he is so moved that:
… I took one single hair of it as a relic… I stick to the Pope’s daughter, and wish myself a cardinal.
