Edward Lear travelled to Italy in 1837, where he remained until the summer of 1841; he first visited Sicily in the following spring of 1842. Lear couldn’t stay away from Italy for long, and spent the winter of 1846 in Rome, before moving on to Naples in April 1847 where he caught the steamer to visit Sicily for the second time. Lear was enchanted with Palermo and remarked that ‘Palermo I think pleased me more than any other city I was ever in’ (M. Drummond, After You, Mr Lear – In the Wake of Edward Lear in Italy, Woodbridge, 2007, p. 176).