LAUSANNE, Switzerland In the center of the city, there's a little-noticed plaque attached to the central post office commemorating an event that made this town a Mecca for Romantic writers in the 19th century. As you stand by the crowded bus stops, jostled by commuters on the rush home from work, it takes a large dose of historical imagination to recreate the pastoral scene here in 1787 when Edward Gibbon penned the last line of his "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." "The silver orb of the moon was reflected from the waters, and all nature was silent," Gibbon wrote in his memoirs of the moment in his garden overlooking Lake Geneva after completing the study - a masterpiece of six volumes, or 1.5 million words, which took him almost 20 years to write. The success of the book, especially among Romantic writers, put Lausanne on the literary map. Although Lausanne never created the buzz of Paris in the 1920s - it is still only a small town of 150,000 people - a steady stream of writers from Byron and Shelley to Victor Hugo, Charles Dickens and Thomas Hardy, were to follow in Gibbon's footsteps. Today, Lausanne is better known as the home to multinational companies like Philip Morris and Tetra Pak, or as the seat of the International Olympic Committee, than for its almost forgotten history as a literary center. The town is laid out on a series of hills, with stunning views across the lake to the French Alps, but has become rather overbuilt in recent years. Other places along the Swiss Riviera attract more notice than Lausanne as artistic hubs. Geneva has its book fair, and Montreux's world-famous Jazz festival brings in people from across the globe. Lausanne has an opera and ballet, but tourists mainly come to see the Olympic Museum. Lausanne's neighbors are also more aggressive in marketing their literary heritage. Montreux has a Hemingway walking tour that takes in the railway platform café where he drank coffee while writing "A Farewell to Arms." A bronze statue of Nabokov stands outside the Montreux Palace Hotel, where he lived for many years until his death in 1977, and devotees still come to place flowers and even copies of "Lolita" on his nearby grave. The most visited tourist site in the area, the Château de Chillon, near Montreux, plays on its literary associations to lure tourists. In the dungeons, you can see where Byron in 1816 was supposed to have carved his name on a pillar. (Some say it's a later graffiti.) Byron would draw on the experience for "The Prisoner of Chillon," one of his best-known poems. But few travelers will learn that Byron wrote the poem while staying in what is now the Hôtel d'Angleterre, on Lausanne's waterfront district of Ouchy. In Nathalie de Saint Phalle's book of literary hotels, Lausanne gets just one mention, for James Joyce's 1935 stay in the Hôtel de la Paix, whereas Geneva has seven. Byron's reason for coming to Lausanne was to make a literary pilgrimage to Gibbon's house on June 27, the anniversary of the date on which he penned the last line of "The Decline and Fall." Less than 30 years after his death, Gibbon had become a hero for the Romantic movement, and his house, La Grotte, a well-known landmark. "They showed us the house where he completed his 'Decline and Fall' and the old locust trees on the terrace from which he gazed upon Mont Blanc as he wrote the last lines of his book," Shelley recorded in his journal. Lausanne's Rue de Bourg, which runs up steeply from the post office toward the medieval cathedral, was at this time packed with literary salons. Years later, when Dickens spent six months in Lausanne in 1846 to work on his novel "Dombey and Son," that ethos still prevailed. "I never saw so many booksellers' shops crammed within the same space, as in the steep up-and-down streets of Lausanne," he wrote his friend and biographer John Forster. Now, a stroll down Rue de Bourg shows that shops selling Prada and Gucci designer wear have taken over. The old town around the cathedral is half asleep and rarely visited, as Lausanne's modern residents have chosen to live in sprawling suburbs. Gibbon's house didn't survive. It was torn down to make way for the post office as Lausanne's wealth grew during the late Industrial Revolution. Thomas Hardy came to seek out Gibbon's muse, also on June 27, but arrived in 1897, one year too late, and had to make do with staying in the next door Hôtel Gibbon. Even this has gone now, demolished in the 1920s and replaced with a neo-colonial building that houses UBS, Europe's largest bank. Only one block of the original building, inscribed with the words Hotel Gibbon, has survived, and it is now part of a side entrance to the bank. Around the corner, Avenue de Gibbon is a nondescript road rarely used by pedestrians or cars. It's hard to imagine the scene in Lausanne's Mon-Repos park in the 18th century when Voltaire would stage his plays. It was during one of these rehearsals when a young Gibbon, yet to make his name, met Voltaire, later writing, "I had the satisfaction of seeing the most extraordinary man of the age." Switzerland was a haven for thinkers and writers in the 18th century, drawn by a lively publishing industry free of the censorship that restricted thought in neighboring countries. Louis XIV's repression of the Huguenots from 1685 brought many refugees to Geneva, Lausanne and other parts of the country. Voltaire lived in Lausanne and Geneva after becoming persona non grata at the Paris court. His rival Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Swiss writer, also helped popularize the area in his epistolary novel "La Nouvelle Héloïse," which was published in 1761 and describes the love affair of a young couple in the Lausanne area. Both these writers helped raise Lausanne's profile and made Lake Geneva a compulsory stopping point for aristocratic British travelers on the Grand Tour of Europe. But it was Gibbon's name that had longer-lasting connections with Lausanne, where by the early 20th century storekeepers were selling Gibbon pens and pipes as souvenirs. Born into a well-to-do family, Gibbon was sent to Lausanne by his father in 1753, at age 16, to learn French and get a Protestant education. After five years of reading heavily in Latin and Greek, he returned to England and later entered Parliament, but he went back to Lausanne in 1783 to finish the last three volumes of his life's work. He liked the quiet and beauty of the town and bemoaned in his memoirs the increasing number of British tourists coming to see the Alpine glaciers. But he was also drawn to the place's intellectual vigor. "Such as I am in Genius, or learning, or in manners, I owe my creation to Lausanne," he wrote. Gibbon was among the first to show a Romantic sensibility toward natural beauty, which was later to make Byron famous, said Brian Norman, author of a book on Gibbon's relationship with Switzerland. Travelers on the Grand Tour had generally found the Alps a hindrance, rather than something of beauty, he said. Byron the rebel, who ranked "The Decline and Fall" among his favorite books, was also drawn by Gibbon's non-conformity. The historian had caused a polemic at home in Britain for his thesis that the rise of Roman Catholicism had been instrumental in the demise of Rome's artistic genius. Nevertheless, the book was a huge success, with each volume selling out only weeks after publication. Other literary talents moved to the area around the time of the French Revolution. Madame de Staël, the daughter of Louis XVI's finance minister, Necker, set up a literary salon in Coppet, near Geneva, after her family was forced to flee. Many of the era's leading artistic lights attended the salon, including Byron and the French writer and politician Benjamin Constant, who was of Swiss origin and was born in Lausanne. On another occasion, Shelley's wife, Mary, had the germ of an idea for Frankenstein after a night of recounting horror tales with Byron and her husband in a villa near the lake. In the 20th century, writers still came to Lausanne, but the reasons for moving here had changed. In a world of paparazzi and autograph hunters, writers, like film and rock stars, could get some privacy among the private-minded Swiss. Georges Simenon, the Belgian writer and creator of Inspector Maigret, died here in 1989, and his ashes were scattered in the small garden of the discrete one-floor cottage where he lived. What he told Paris-Match brought him to Lausanne - that people left him alone despite his fame - stands in sharp contrast to the spirit of the Romantic past.