Museo della Grafica Palazzo Lanfranchi

This guide to the Museo della Grafica in Pisa's Palazzo Lanfranchi starts with Mary Shelley, one evening in eighteen twenty, hearing an electrical hum leak from behind a locked door somewhere in this palace on the Arno. It introduces the surgeon who lived here, Andrea Vacca Berlinghieri, trained under John Hunter in London, and the rumor that behind that door he ran experiments reanimating dead muscle with electric current. The guide follows the story local tradition ties to that hum, and to a novel Mary Shelley was already drafting. Stand in the courtyard and look up at the plain brick facade her hostess's guests once climbed toward on candlelit evenings.