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Professor John Mullan welcomes Her Majesty The Queen to the Byron Museum in Ravenna, Italy
6 May 2025
On 10 April, Professor John Mullan welcomed HM the Queen to the Byron Museum in Ravenna, Italy, once home to Lord Byron and Teresa Guiccioli.
On 10 April, Professor John Mullan, Head of the Department of English, welcomed Her Majesty The Queen to the Byron Museum at Palazzo Guiccioli in Ravenna, as part of the King and Queen’s official visit to Italy.
Professor Mullan was representing the Queen’s Reading Room, Her Majesty’s charity for promoting and celebrating the pleasures and benefits of reading. The Queen came to present books to local schools and to look around the museum in the recently restored Palazzo Guiccioli, once a near ruin. Byron lived in Ravenna for almost three years, some of this time in an apartment the Palazzo, home of his lover, Teresa Guiccioli, and her husband, Count Guiccioli.
In his speech of welcome, Professor Mullan described Byron’s extraordinary poetic creativity during his Ravenna years, and reflected on the Italiophilia of many great English poets. He then accompanied the Queen on a tour of the museum, which displays many of the relics that Teresa kept of her relationship with Byron.
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