With the death of Shelley in July 1822, four of those who had been with Byron on the Lake of Geneva six years before were gone, and he would not live much longer himself. The failure of de Staël to reconcile him with his wife had been a turning point in his life and from then on he did all he could to put his marriage behind him. What aided him in the methods he first chose to achieve this objective was that the Venice in which he settled in November 1816 was a very different town from Geneva. There was in the first place a plentiful supply of prostitutes and then a good number of middle-aged or frankly old men who accepted, with more or less good grace, that their much younger wives should have one designated admirer (a cavalier servente). The attitude to sex was more relaxed in Venice and, as its Carnival illustrated, there was there a belief in enjoyment which was the very antithesis of Calvinism. Byron found the atmosphere congenial and threw himself into a long period of dissipation. In February 1817 he would tell his sister that if Lady Byron ‘would rejoin me tomorrow – I would not accept the proposition’, and although he never ceased to love Augusta, he began to realise that she was now lost to him.

Byron's method for putting the past behind him was only brought to an end when, in April 1819, he fell in love with the 21-year-old Teresa Guiccioli, the third wife of a rich count almost three times her age.