She looks a sea Cybele, fresh from ocean,
Rising with her tiara of proud towers
At airy distance, with majestic motion,
A ruler of the waters and their powers.

These lines are Byron’s celebrated description of Venice, written during his residence in Italy in the early 19th century. Byron lived in Venice from 1816 to 1819, a period that strongly shaped his Italian writings and supplied vivid local color for his long narrative poem *Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage*. The image evokes Venice’s unique emergence from the sea and its historic identity as a maritime republic—“ruler of the waters”—at once magnificent and slightly unreal, seen at a distance as if rising from the Adriatic. The classical allusion to Cybele (a mother-goddess often shown crowned with towers) heightens the sense of an ancient, sovereign city.

Byron likens Venice to “sea Cybele,” a divine figure crowned with a turreted diadem, to convey the city’s grandeur and dominion. The “tiara of proud towers” suggests both Venice’s skyline and its former imperial authority, while “airy distance” and “majestic motion” capture the optical illusion of a city seeming to float above water. The simile fuses classical mythology with modern geography, turning a real place into a mythic apparition. Beneath the praise lies a Romantic tension: Venice is presented as a sovereign power of the sea, yet the very dreamlike, distant quality hints at fragility and the fading of past glory.