Brand Extension
On the chart it’s the Golfo di La Spezia, but in the marketing materials of the local tourist authorities it’s increasingly being referred to as the “Bay of Poets.” Yes, Dante and Petrarch took their vacations here, but that’s not who they’re referring to. The heavyweight medieval Italians seem to have been displaced in popular culture by the more whimsical allure of the English Romantics, led by the tragic Percy Shelley, who lived in Lerici for a while and died in a boating accident just down the coast; his talented wife Mary, the author of Frankenstein; and that glowering, dark-eyed toff, Lord Byron.
Byron spent time in Porto Venere, a beautiful natural
