visited San Lazzaro, such as composers Jacques Offenbach, Gioachino Rossini, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Richard Wagner (1859), writers Alfred de Musset and George Sand (1834), Marcel Proust (1900), Ivan Turgenev, Nikolai Gogol, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, British art critic John Ruskin (early 1850s), and French historian Ernest Renan (1850). During the 19th century numerous monarchs visited the island, including Charles IV of Spain, Franz Joseph I of Austria, Umberto I of Italy, Charles I of Romania, Emma of Waldeck and Pyrmont, Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, Prince Napoléon Bonaparte, Ludwig I of Bavaria, (1841), Margherita of Savoy, Maximilian I of Mexico, Carlota of Mexico, Edward VII, Prince of Wales and future British king (1861), Napoleon III (1862), Pedro II of Brazil (1871), Princess Louise, Duchess of Argyll (1881), Alexander I of Russia. U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant and British Prime Minister William Gladstone visited San Lazzaro in 1878 and 1879, respectively. A legend claims that future Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, a Bolshevik revolutionary at the time, worked as a bell-ringer at the monastery of San Lazzaro in 1907. However, there is no evidence that Stalin ever visited the island. Armenians Russian-Armenian marine painter Ivan Aivazovsky visited San Lazzaro in 1840. He met his older brother, Gabriel, who was working at the monastery at that time. At the monastery library and the art gallery Aivazovsky familiarized himself with Armenian manuscripts and Armenian art in general. Another Armenian painter, Vardges Sureniants, visited San Lazzaro in 1881 and researched Armenian miniatures. Ethnographer Yervand Lalayan worked at the island for around six months in 1894. Musicologist Komitas lectured on Armenian folk and sacred music and researched the Armenian music notation (khaz) system in the monastery library in July 1907. The first meeting of poets Yeghishe Charents and Avetik Isahakyan took place in San Lazzaro in 1924. Soviet Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian visited it in 1963, and Soviet Armenian astrophysicist Victor Ambartsumian in 1969. At least two catholicoi (leaders) of the Armenian Apostolic Church—which was historically a rival of the Armenian Catholic Church, which the Mekhitarists are a part of—have visited the island: Vazgen I (in 1958 and 1970) and Karekin II (in 2008). Since independence in 1991 at least three presidents of Armenia—Robert Kocharyan in 2005, Serzh Sargsyan in 2011, and Armen Sarkissian (with his wife Nouneh Sarkissian) in 2019—visited San Lazzaro. Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan also visited San Lazzaro in 2019. Henrikh Mkhitaryan, an Armenia