section_path: Early life and family/Return to Venezuela and second journey to Europe: 1802–1805
section_name: Return to Venezuela and second journey to Europe: 1802–1805
paragraph_text: Return to Venezuela and second journey to Europe: 1802–1805
  
  Bolívar and del Toro, aged 18 and 21 respectively, were married in Madrid on 26 May 1802. The couple boarded the San Ildefonso in La Coruña on 15 June and sailed for La Guaira, where they arrived on 12 July. They settled in Caracas, where del Toro fell ill and died of yellow fever on 22 January 1803. Bolívar was devastated by del Toro's death and later told Louis Peru de Lacroix, one of his generals and biographers, that he swore to never remarry. By July 1803, Bolívar had decided to leave Venezuela for Europe. He entrusted his estates to an agent and his brother and in October boarded a ship bound for Cádiz.
  
  Bolívar arrived in Spain in December 1803, then traveled to Madrid to console his father-in-law. In March 1804, the municipal authorities of Madrid ordered all non-residents in the city to leave to alleviate a bread shortage brought about by Spain's resumed hostilities with Britain. Over April, Bolívar and Fernando Rodríguez del Toro, a childhood friend and relative of his wife, made their way to Paris and arrived in time for Napoleon to be proclaimed Emperor of the French on 18 May 1804. They rented an apartment on the Rue Vivienne and met with other South Americans such as Carlos de Montúfar, Vicente Rocafuerte, and Simón Rodríguez, who joined Bolívar and del Toro in their apartment. While in Paris, Bolívar began a dalliance with the Countess Dervieu du Villars, at whose salon he likely met the naturalists Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, who had traveled through much of Spanish America from 1799 to 1804. Bolívar allegedly discussed Spanish American independence with them.
  
  I swear before you... that I will not rest body or soul until I have broken the chains binding us to the will of Spanish might!
  
  Simón Bolívar, 15 August 1805
  
  In April 1805, Bolívar left Paris with Rodríguez and del Toro on a Grand Tour to Italy. Beginning in Lyon, they traveled through the Savoy Alps and then to Milan. The trio arrived on 26 May 1805 and witnessed Napoleon's coronation as King of Italy. From Milan, they traveled down the Po Valley to Venice, then to Florence, and then finally Rome, where Bolívar met, among others, Pope Pius VII, French writer Germaine de Staël, and Humboldt again. Rome's sites and history excited Bolívar. On 18 August 1805, when he, del Toro, and Rodríguez traveled to the Mons Sacer, where the plebs had seceded from Rome in the 4th century BC, Bolívar swore to end Spanish rule in the Americas.