2024 marks bicentenary of Lord Byron's death.

The bicentenary of the death of English Romantic poet Lord Byron is being marked in Rome with a year-long programme of events organised by the Keats-Shelley House.

The museum at the foot of the Spanish Steps is hosting a series of poetry readings, talks and literary events in honour of Byron who spent seven years of self-imposed exile in Italy.

In addition to the readings, conferences and exhibitions, the internationally acclaimed pianist Julius Drake and tenor Ian Bostridge will perform a special Byronic themed concert at Palazzo Doria Pamphilj on 25 June.

The website of the Keats-Shelley House contains a timeline of events in the colourful life of Lord Byron who left England in 1816, never to return, living mainly in Italy until his death in modern-day Greece aged 36.

What’s the next stop on our interactive map of Lord Byron’s travels across Europe? #Pisa!

Follow this link to find out more about Byron’s final year in Italy: https://t.co/NdSw2o94rJ

With thanks to @UKinItaly @UKinItalia & @Keats_Shelley.@UKMissionGeneva @ukingreece pic.twitter.com/lqNHBQv6NV

— UK Embassy Berne (@UKEmbassyBerne) April 18, 2024

Fleeing debts and a desperate personal situation, Byron befriended fellow Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley and Frankenstein author Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley at Lake Geneva before travelling to Italy where he would live predominantly in Venice, Pisa and Ravenna.

According to popular myth he also lodged at Piazza di Spagna 66 in Rome, opposite the Keats-Shelley House, in 1817.

To commemorate the bicentenary of Lord Byron's death we are proud to announce the launch of ‘Byron’s Italy: An Anglo-Italian Romance’: an exhibition at the Keats-Shelley House, dedicated to his relationship to Italian culture. https://t.co/73SFdgmgkU pic.twitter.com/b8vPUywHnN

— Keats-Shelley House (@Keats_Shelley) April 19, 2024

Byron wrote many of his greatest works in Italy, including Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto IV (1818), The Prophecy of Dante (1821), and Don Juan (1819-24).

Rome features strongly in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, which contains the immortal words "Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!"

• Tracing the footsteps of Rome's foreign writers and artists

Lord Byron died on 19 April 1824 in a fit of fever in Messolonghi, Greece, where he had gone to aid the Greeks in their fight for independence from the Turks.

He is buried in his family vault at Hucknall Torkard in Nottinghamshire, and a memorial stone in his honour can be found in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey.