The Next Shelley: A Selection from Taras Grescoe’s Possess the Air (2020)
“Lauro de Bosis, a young man destined to amaze the world, rarely failed to make a strong first impression. On the brink of adulthood, he was boyishly handsome, lithely athletic, almost princely in demeanour. Children gathered around when he entered a room, and he would delight them by swiftly confecting an origami frog or producing a flaming match from a handkerchief. His peers were astonished by his worldliness, eclectic interests, and precocious erudition. From his boyhood, his father had taught him to chant verse in ancient Greek, medieval Italian, and modern-day English. While other boys drew dragons and automobiles, his childhood sketchbooks were filled with images of flight: Icarus soaring on homemade wings, the winged horse Pegasus rising against the Mediterranean sun, Apollo driving fiery steeds through the heavens. His early schooling in literature, history, and ancient languages had made him at once discerningly romantic and proudly Roman in spirit. His conversation was studded with words like ‘glory,’ ‘imperishable,’ and ‘immortal,’ and he would walk away from anyone who suggested Wordsworth was a better poet than Keats or Shelley.
Lauro’s penchant for high-minded conversation was leavened by physical prowess, playful energy, and an indomitable joie de vivre. Reciting lines from Virgil on a moonlit walk in the Campagna, he might impulsively shuck his clothes to go for a dip in a volcanic lake. A friend of his father’s once witnessed a teenaged Lauro dive from a railway bridge over the shallow Tiber, swim with strong strokes to the riverbank, and rise from the water ‘like an ooze-covered Latium lake-god.’ Long days swimming in the Adriatic, where his parents had their summer residence, had earned him the nickname ‘Fofino’—‘Fofo’ for short—after the word in the local dialect for ‘little octopus.’
He was, in short, a golden boy: half-Italian, half-American, wholly original. For Thornton Wilder, Edgar and Lilian Mowrer, Nancy Cox McCormack and others who encountered him in the early twenties, he seemed to blaze as vividly as a comet over a chaotic, war-darkened nation.
Lauro’s origins were improbably poetic. His father’s family came from Ancona, an Adriatic port founded by settlers from Syracuse where the local dialect was still peppered with words of ancient Greek origin. When Adolfo de Bosis was ten, his father, who had married his brother’s widowed wife, shot himself with a revolver; after his death, fifty thousand lire were found missing from his stepchildren’s accounts. Adolfo, who had suffered from bouts of depression since his infancy, was sent away to boarding school. Only the discovery of the work of a transcendent English poet lifted him out of his gloom. Taught the language by a blind, half-British tutor, Adolfo set about translating Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Time’ into Italian at the age of sixteen.”—Taras Grescoe, Possess the Air: Love, Heroism, and the Battle for the Soul of Mussolini’s Rome (2020)
