On 17th September 1820, accompanied by his friend Joseph Severn, John Keats left London for Italy on board the Maria Crowther in a desperate bid to restore his health. Anguished at the thought of having to part, possibly for ever, from his fianc-and his friends, troubled by money worries and broken in body and mind, the young poet launched on his last journey on earth with both a sense of hope and a deep foreboding that his efforts would be in vain. Despite Keats''s own assertion that by then he no longer felt a citizen of the world and was leading a -posthumous life-, his final five months were filled with events of great biographical interest, and deserve to be examined much more carefully.
Using exclusively primary sources and first-hand accounts, Keats''s editor and translator Alessandro Gallenzi has pieced together all the available material - adding newly discovered and previously unpublished documents - to help the reader follow the poet step by step from his departure
