Although the view over the bay is good, Rapallo has surely lost the charms it held for the celebrities of the past, including Ezra Pound and his friends. Drifting around it a few years ago, Roy Foster (LRB, 30 November 2000) thought Rapallo an 'inescapably bourgeois' place. He could find nothing to commemorate 'the embarrassing Pound' on the building in Via Marsala where EP and Dorothy took a top-floor apartment in 1925, but that's because the handsome plaque is mounted on the other side, over a passageway from the street to the seafront. It reproduces a fragment of Canto 116 containing the line, 'To confess wrong without losing rightness' (a tall order in Pound's case), which leaves you trying to recall the dazzling bit a little earlier ('But the beauty is not the madness/Though my errors and wrecks lie about me'), which reads like Yeats under high compression.

LRB 23 October 2008 | PDF Download