Two centuries after his death, why is Lord Byron still seductive?

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Ottoman rule. He died there, in Missolonghi, of a fever on April 19th 1824, aged 36. The Greeks, who adored him, kept his lungs and larynx in an urn; the rest of Byron was returned to England, against his wishes.

(“Let not my body be hacked, or sent to England," he had ordered.) Westminster Abbey refused to accept a man of “questionable morality", so he was buried at a local church in Nottinghamshire, near his ancestral home. Within a month of his death his remaining friends burned his memoirs, judging them too scandalous. Two centuries later, the poet is mostly recalled in the context of the Byronic hero: a dark, brooding, sexy rebel, derived partly from Byron’s celebrity persona and also from his works, such as his autobiograph ical masterpiece, “Don Juan".

In England the bicentenary has been marked by new books and events. But many are also taking place abroad, in the countries that hosted his self-imposed exile. In Italy, where he wrote some of his greatest works, including “Don Juan", he is claimed as something of a national poet.

The Keats-Shelley House, at the foot of the Spanish Steps in Rome, is holding a year-long festival of readings, exhibitions and performances. “Byron’s Italy: An Anglo-Italian Romance" emphasises how his Italian experiences shaped his poetry. “I love the language, that soft bastard Latin, / Which melts like kisses from a female mouth," Byron wrote in “Beppo", a satirical poem set at the Venetian carnival.

It was his first attempt at ottava rima, an Italian rhyming stanza form. In “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage", a moody wanderer journeys through Italy’s crumbling beauty, “a ruin amidst ruins". It doubled as a travel guide, inspiring British and American tourists.