I’ll digress slightly today from posting about our Verona trip to announce the launch of a fun little side project that Chris and I are doing.

It’s called Robert and Elizabeth – click here to visit it. The English poets Robert Barrett and Elizabeth Browning wrote to each other during their courtship back in 1845-46. In a period of about 21 months, they wrote over 500 letters to each other. Once they married, the correspondence between the two ceased, as they were never again apart. Their son published two volumes of the letters following their deaths.

If you’re a romantic at heart, Robert and Elizabeth’s story is for you. It involves a secret courtship, an eventual elopement, and then a happy married life spent almost entirely in Italy.  Chris worked with their letters for a project last year.  Since then, we’ve been fascinated with how these letters capture a time and style of writing that you don’t see nowadays, and maybe really didn’t see much back then. Both Robert and Elizabeth display wit and intelligence in their letters; at once point, they even flirt by debating the translation of something in Ancient Greek, if you can imagine. For me, it’s quite fun to read how they got to know each other first through their letters — it took months for them to arrange to finally meet in person — as well as to see what happened next when it became clear her family did not approve of their relationship.

Their correspondence started on January 10, 1845, and carried on continuously until their marriage in 1846. The Robert and Elizabeth website will post each of the letters in turn on the day of the month in which it was originally postmarked, the first being posted tomorrow, January 10. If you use the “Subscribe via email” form on the right-hand side of the home page, you can sign up to get notified when Robert and Elizabeth have sent another letter. [Note: you should get an email that you will need to use to confirm your subscription.  If you don’t see the email in your Inbox,  check your Spam or Junk folders to see if your mail program put it there.] Or, you can just check back each day on the blog site itself – most days, there’s likely to be a new letter, as Robert and Elizabeth wrote to each other almost daily.

Now, I’m not sure if they ever went to Verona (they eventually lived in Florence), and their romance had a much more satisfying happy ending than Shakespeare’s fictional lovers in Verona, but the photo below that I took last week in Verona seemed to fit today’s theme.

Well it does as long as you think that beam of light on the Adige River looks like a heart.  🙂

Heart of Light on the Adige River, Verona, December 2012