Byron in Italy - Venetian debauchery, Roman sightseeing, revolutionary politics in Ravenna, horse riding, swimming, sword-brandishing, pistol shooting, and the poet's 'last attachment' - forms part of the fabric of Romantic mythology. Yet Byron's time in Italy was crucial to his development as a writer, to Italy's sense of itself as a unified nation, to Europe's perceptions of national identity and to the evolution of Romanticism both in Britain and on the Continent.

It was also in Italy that Byron honed the dazzling protean ability to reinvent himself, as both poet and cultural icon, which continues to speak directly to readers today. As history again forces Britain to rethink its relationship with the rest of Europe - and Europe to rethink the British - this volume brings together Byron scholars from the UK, Europe and the US to re-assess the topic of 'Byron and Italy' in all its inter-national complexity. It considers Byron's relationship to Italian literature, people, society, geography, art, religion and politics. It discusses Byron's sinuous navigations between British and Italian identities. It sets Byron's writing in Italy - poetry and prose - against a range of contemporary and modern-day contexts - from tourism to ethnography, from Italian sexual mores to geocriticism, from paramilitary uprisings to parabasic downplayings - to better understand the ways in which Italy Italianised Byron and Byron Byronised Italy.