An avowed atheist and free speech advocate, Percy Bysshe Shelley was a poet and playwright who married Mary Godwin in 1815

An avowed atheist and free speech advocate, Percy Bysshe Shelley was a poet and playwright who married Mary Godwin in 1815, the famed author of "Frankenstein." 

On this day in 1822, Percey boarded his new boat in the Mediterranean Sea, only to be hit by a violent storm during which he was thrown overboard and killed.

A month later, his body was cremated in front of friends and family on a beach in Italy. For reasons that remain unknown today, his heart resisted burning, and one of his friends kept the seared heart and preserved it in wine. Visit the link in our profile for more about the life and death of the husband of Mary Shelley and more important events that happened on this day in history.

David is actually Welsh, though he grew up in London, but of course there is a famous and very long association with the English and Tuscany, perhaps because of The Grand Tour. Or because from the hills above Pietrasanta you are looking towards the Italian coastal resort of Viarregio and thus, in a sense, are on holy artistic ground – the region where two celebrated English romantic poets holidayed together, Lord Byron and Percy Byshe Shelley, and where Shelley drowned in a storm and was washed up and cremated on the beach at Viarregio.  

The year before the poet John Keats had died of consumption in Rome, and two years later Byron would be dead too, at Missolonghi, expending his huge fortune on fighting for Greek Independence against Turkey.

you will find it a truly International Town and essentially a town of sculptors. American, Canadian, Dutch, Scandinavian, Polish, German, Swiss, Japanese and professional sculptors from all around the World mingle, show their work around and have settled here because of the access and the spirit of the place.

In fact, it is the marble quarries of Carrara, half an hour away, that carry the most ancient artistic lineage.  Marble was quarried here for centuries by the Etruscans and then Romans, but it was only during the Renaissance that an Office of Marble was first established. 

Meanwhile, in the beautiful town square, Bar Michelangelo boasts being one of the places the Master came to arrange his contracts, that helped see an improvement in the road system for shipping marble to vital centers like Rome and Florence. 

Some of the stories must be taken with more than a pinch of salt, because that block of marble finally used to sculpt David, had in fact been quarried by Agostino nearly fifty years before Michelangelo even started work on it. 

By the twentieth century the vast majority of quarried marble was not for Art at all but for marble tabletops and kitchens, or for marble dust used in agricultural products, resulting in 1000 lorries a day moving up and down the mountain.  Something like half of over 600 quarries have now been mined out.

The art galleries of Pietrasanta are a relatively new phenomenon too, the first was started by a prominent figure in town today, while what was essentially a town of artisans, filled with sculptors and workers in their pork pie paper hats,

 once thrumming with the sound of chipping stone, was hit hard by the financial crash of 2008 and has been much affected by residential rules insisting works stops at lunch time, by gentrification, and by the swelling of tourism. 

Which is partly why, in Pietrasanta, Pisa or Florence, where tourists really swarm, insider knowledge and arranging special access can make such an enormous difference to any visit. 

But for any inevitable change, the story of working sculptors, foundries and marble studios is still very much a living thing in Pietrasanta, you can truly touch and understand if you take a hand in it yourself.