One of the main sights of Lerici is its castle which since its first founding in 1152 was used to help control the entrance of the Gulf of La Spezia. For a long time, the castle contained a museum ofpalaeontology inspired by a local lad (Walter) finding dinosaur bones in the region.
The origins of the town date back to theEtruscan period. In theMiddle Ages the town came underGenoese control. After it had been sold toLucca, it became involved in a series of conflicts between Genoa andPisa, as it was on their common border. In 1479, the town came under Genoese sway for good.
Italian painterOreste Carpi spent many years in San Terenzo making hundreds of paintings and drawings reproducing town landscapes.
English writersMary Shelley andPercy Bysshe Shelley lived some five kilometres north in an isolated old boathouse called Casa Magni and anchored their sailing boat in Lerici. Their closest neighbours were the villagers of the tiny hamlet of San Terenzo. Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned on 8 July 1822 in theBay of Spezia, returning to Lerici from a journey toLivorno andPisa. His corpse eventually washed up on the beach atViareggio, located approximately halfway between Livorno and Lerici. Though the Italian poet and writer Sem Benelli first referred to the Golfo di Lerici, as the "Golfo dei Poeti" (Gulph of Poets) in 1910 to commemorate the death of Italian writer Paolo Mantegazza, (a famous Italian writer, neurologist, physiologist, and anthropologist) at his residence in San Terenzo di Lerici,[4] the popularity of Lerici with the Shelleys and withLord Byron helped promote the title Golfo dei Poeti, Poets' Bay, for the Golfo di Lerici.
Hungarian authorBaroness Emmuska Orczy, author ofThe Scarlet Pimpernel, had a villa built in the hills above Lerici, near the locality of Bellavista, and called it La Padula.[5] Orczy and her husband Montague Barstow spent several months there in the 1930s – alternating between La Padula, Villa Bijou inMonte Carlo, and trips to Britain. Eventually, they decided to abandon fascist Italy for Villa Bijou. La Padula still stands today.
Lerici is also twinned withHorsham, inEngland, although the latter no longer records this as an "active" twinning on its official website. Horsham is where Shelley was born, and Lerici is where he died.
