Conservationists in Livorno have appealed to the Tuscan regional authorities to save from ruin a villa in which Lord Byron stayed during his long exile in Italy.

Byron, who lived at various times in Venice, Rome, Ravenna, Pisa and Genoa as part of a circle of exiled Romantic poets including Percy Bysshe Shelley, went to Livorno in April 1822, staying at the Villa Dupouy, owned by Count Pietro Dupouy, a wealthy banker. He stayed there for three months until Shelley’s death by drowning, in the nearby Gulf of La Spezia, in July 1822.

A year later Byron stopped again at Livorno while sailing from Genoa to join the fight for independence in Greece, where he died in 1824. A local road, Via Giorgio Byron, was named after the poet in 1900 to commemorate his association with Livorno.

Fabio Roggiolani, a Green Party councillor in Livorno, said the Villa Dupouy — also known as the “Casa Rossa”, or Red House — had been allowed to fall into disrepair and was near-derelict. He said it was “part of the historic patrimony” of Livorno, and he had appealed to Claudio Martini, president of the Tuscan region, to step in and buy it with regional funds to prevent it being put up for auction.

However, Federico Gelli, the deputy president of Tuscany, said that although the regional council regarded preservation of its heritage as a “priority”, it could not afford the €2 million (£1.6 million) that had been set as the asking price by its present owners. “The most we can do is to offer our collaboration to whoever buys the villa to enure that its memories are honoured and preserved”, he said.

Partisan groups joined the preservation campaign, pointing out that the villa had been used during the Second World War as the local headquartes of the Committee for National Liberation, the anti-Fascist partisans’ guiding body. Garibaldo Benifei, a former partisan, now 96, said it would be “marvellous to be able to use the villa as a museum explaining to our young people what happened in the war”.

La Stampa said that the villa was believed to be haunted — not by the ghost of Byron, however, but by that of Count Dupouy’s daughter, whose lover he had decapitated with his sword, banishing his daughter to a convent. It said local people swore they had seen the ghost of the girl “desperately seeking her dead lover and holding his head in her hand”.