Did Shakespeare Travel in Italy?
- Mar 18, 2025
- 7 min read
Is there evidence that he knew it firsthand?
Shakespeare set more plays in Italy than in any country outside England. From the canals and law courts of Venice to the streets of Verona and the port city of Messina in Sicily, Italy dominates the Shakespearean landscape. Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Much Ado About Nothing, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and The Taming of the Shrew are only the beginning.
Shakespeare’s Italian plays contain details that are oddly specific: accurate geography, local customs, political tensions between Italian states, knowledge of Venetian law, and observations that often feel less like fantasy than memory.
How did Shakespeare know Italy so well?
Was he simply an extraordinarily well-read playwright piecing together secondhand sources? Or do the plays preserve the experiences of someone who had actually traveled through Italy during the Renaissance, transforming real journeys, real cities, and real political events into drama?
For centuries, scholars have debated. And the Italian plays continue to raise uncomfortable questions.
My husband, Rich, and I decided to follow Shakespeare's trail in Italy and examine the evidence first hand.
Are history and literature the same in Shakespeare?
Before we left, if you had asked Rich, a lawyer and an historian, whether Shakespeare’s Italian plays were fluffy fictions disconnected from real events, set in imagined sceneries, he would have said, "Of course!" To Rich, the name on the plays meant that the guy from Stratford-Upon-Avon made them up because there's no evidence that he ever left England.
But I thought Shakespeare's plays revealed historical perspectives and facts that also document Shakespeare’s life, his relationships, travels and political commentary, cleverly woven into different settings and story lines.
The politics of one age become its history in the next. I argued to Rich that Shakespeare’s works aren’t just literature; they are dramatizations of then-contemporary politics which he witnessed. Even when set in ancient Rome, Shakespeare was writing about the power struggles of his own time.
Many of his characters are based on well-known Tudor court personalities, including Queen Elizabeth herself. To read about a few, try: Did Queen Elizabeth I Have a Secret Violent Streak?
His characters speak lines that his audiences would recognize as commentary on then-current events. If you are curious, check out: How Shakespeare Encoded History, French Diplomacy and the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre into Love’s Labour’s Lost.
But to get away with writing such risky material, Shakespear had to set some plays in foreign countries, cities and landscapes, thereby dressing England in geographic fig leaves as camouflage so that his political discourse didn't get labeled as treason. This was a wise move at a time when "free speech" often amounted to beheading.
As they aged over the centuries, Shakespeare’s plays and poems remained eye-witness history encapsulated in a cocoon of "mere" literature.
But, again, that one big mystery kept surfacing.
Why did Shakespeare set so many of his plays in Italy?
How many of Shakespeare’s 38 plays are set wholly or partially in Italy? Fifteen, just as many as in England.
They overflow with precise details about Italian dialects, laws, customs, geographic and urban specifics, precise distances, even the interiors of actual Italian nobles’ palazzi, whose owners did not roll out the welcome mat to casual travelers.
The Mystery of Shakespeare’s Italian Plays: How Did He Know So Much?
No record suggests that the man from Stratford-upon-Avon ever left England or that he spoke Italian. So how did he know so much about Italy, Italians and Italian?
Was Shakespeare actually from a noble Italian family? Or was he a well-credentialed Englishman, fluent in Italian, who traveled the length and breadth of la bella penisola with letters of introduction that would open any door?
We debated hotly from our armchairs.
This is when Rich said, “Prove it.”
The Journey to Prove It: Shakespeare’s Italy?
Rich might not be a Shakespeare fan, but he loves Italy. Armed with Shakespeare’s Italian plays, maps old and new, The Shakespeare Guide to Italy by Richard Roe, and my historical research (most of it in Italian), I proposed a travel adventure and a quest.
Our mission: to test my theory that Shakespeare’s works are primary historical sources against Rich’s theory that they were pure invention, by searching for physical evidence that the Bard didn’t just invent his version of Italy from afar.
If the Bard’s Italian plays weren’t just stories, but guidebooks to Italy, they would lead us in Shakespeare’s footsteps in the very Italian streets and beaches he walked.
And Rich would have to admit that I was right.
Following the Evidence: Shakespeare in Northern Italy
Rich was intrigued by my offer of an outside-of-the-box Italian adventure vacation, provided that it had some serious historical teeth. He agreed that because the fellow from Stratford-upon-Avon had never left England, if the plays proved a reliable travel guide through Italy 400 years later, then the footsteps we followed, and thus the plays, had to belong to someone else.
But he seriously doubted that the footsteps we followed would have much in common with those of the man many people believe wrote under the pseudonym "William Shakespeare", Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, who made a journey throughout Italy as a young man in 1575 and into 1576.
To test my theory, we applied a three-part test:
(1) We matched de Vere’s documented travels against the locations in the plays.
(2) We compared the plays’ details against physical evidence in modern Italy and reputable historical sources about de Vere’s travels.
(3) We searched for 400-year-old physical evidence in modern Italy that aligned with both the plays and de Vere’s history.
The results?
Watch the Evidence Unfold
👀See for yourself in Part I of Traveling Together Through Shakespeare’s Italy: Shakespeare in Northern Italy
Using Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Tempest, Taming of the Shrew, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Othello and Merchant of Venice as our travel guide, we traced a route through northern Italy from Milan, Mantua, Verona and Padua to Venice and tried matching it to de Vere’s recorded travels.
Beyond the natural beauty and charm of Italy, there were surprises: clues in Shakespeare’s text that linked history, place and plays in ways we never could have predicted. For example:
Did You Know About Travel in Renaissance Italy by Canals?
Renaissance northern Italy was crisscrossed by a vast network of navigable rivers and canals making travel by boat faster and safer than by road. Some modern Shakespeare scholars claim Shakespeare made a mistake when his characters sailed through “landlocked” cities because they assumed that, since he never left England, he did not understand Italian geography.
But he knew exactly how to cross the breadth of northern Italy by boat! Not only that – it is still possible today in some places, including Milan!
Shakespeare in Sicily: The Trail Continues
One trip wasn’t enough. We had only followed the Bard’s footsteps in northern Italy. Had Shakespeare traveled in both northern and southern Italy?
For our second trip, I needed to create a Shakespearean travel guide to southern Italy, using yet more historical research, Roe and Shakespeare’s plays set on the Adriatic and Sicilian coasts: Much Ado About Nothing, The Winter’s Tale, The Comedy of Errors, The Tempest and Twelfth Night.
Again, our three-part test delivered intriguing results. Not only did we find firsthand evidence that Shakespeare knew these locations incredibly well, down to details that could only be known by someone who had been there, but we also uncovered something unexpected. The settings of the plays mirrored exactly the route de Vere must have followed when he disappeared for five months in 1575 during a massive plague outbreak in Italy.
We found ourselves on an unexpected second mission, trying to solve the mystery of where de Vere had gone and why he had disappeared. We overlaid Italian history, Elizabethan letters, reports from Burghley’s spies and even the ancient hero Aeneas’ journey around the Italian peninsula on top of the southern Italian plays.
Did Vergil Influence Shakespeare’s Travels in Italy?
Shakespeare knew Vergil’s The Aeneid well. He used it often in his plays, especially The Tempest. De Vere was marooned in Italy because the Alpine passes were blocked due to the plague (exactly like the messenger in Romeo and Juliet who returns with Romeo’s undelivered letter to Juliet). Could it be that de Vere used The Aeneid as his travel guide as he tried to outrun the plague that summer, just like we were using Shakespeare’s plays?
👉Follow us and decide for yourself as we trace Aeneas, Shakespeare and de Vere on a Sicilian adventure in Part II of Traveling Together Through Shakespeare’s Italy: Shakespeare in Sicily
Discover the Real-World Locations of Shakespeare’s Plays
From Verona’s ancient walls to the coastlines of “Bohemia” and “Illyria” (modern-day Croatia), Shakespeare’s famous Italian plays breathe authenticity.
We did our best to figure out the answer to our quest. Wondering whether Shakespeare was actually in Venice, we stood inside a Palladian villa situated the exact distance and direction from Venice that Shakespeare says “Belmont” was, where Portia drops hints about which casket wins her hand in The Merchant of Venice. Puzzling over whether Prospero’s island in The Tempest could be in Italy (since he was Duke of Milan), and not across the Atlantic Ocean in the Caribbean, we investigated a cave very like his on a remote Aeolian island, listened to the waves wash the shore outside, and inhaled for ourselves the nearby “pools” that Shakespeare’s Trinculo claimed smell like “horse-piss”.
Experiencing the pieces of the historical puzzle shifting in unforeseen combinations, we found that the answer to whether literature is history becomes clearer, and Shakespeare’s Italian plays started to unlock an even deeper and more beautiful Elizabethan secret!
What did we find?
🗝️Unlock the Evidence Yourself: Watch the Traveling Together Through Shakespeare’s Italy Series
🏔️Unlock Part I: Shakespeare in Northern Italy
⚓️Set Sail for Part II: Shakespeare in Sicily
More Secrets to Come
Have Rich and I made further trips following Shakespeare’s trail based on other plays? Well, of course! I am researching a new trip right now!
📜You can join us on our next journey, and uncover even more Elizabethan secrets and Shakespearean mysteries here: https://www.dorotheadickerman.com/subscribe
Or on Instagram, under SeekingShakespeare here: https://www.instagram.com/ddickerman01
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