The Non-Catholic Cemetery: Keats, Shelley & the Angel of Grief
Why is it significant?
Push open the gate and step into the shade of the cypresses. Sounds of traffic fade away; there are tombstones leaning in the long grass, violets, a cat asleep on a sarcophagus. Oscar Wilde, who came here as a young man, called it the holiest place in Rome.
Key Facts
| Place | The Non-Catholic Cemetery: Keats, Shelley & the Angel of Grief |
|---|---|
| Address | Via Caio Cestio 6, 00153 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.87640, 12.47940 |
| Part of Walk | The Keyhole and the Amphora Hill: Aventine Secrets & Testaccio's Roman Soul |
| Generated | Generated |
Push open the gate and step into the shade of the cypresses. Sounds of traffic fade away; there are tombstones leaning in the long grass, violets, a cat asleep on a sarcophagus. Oscar Wilde, who came here as a young man, called it the holiest place in Rome.
Catholic Rome would not bury Protestants, Jews, Orthodox Christians or unbelievers in consecrated ground. From the early eighteenth century, foreigners who died in the city were laid to rest here, outside the walls, at first at night, so as not to cause offence. Gradually the field beneath the pyramid became the resting place of poets, painters, diplomats and revolutionaries from every corner of the world.
Walk to the older part, to the left, and find a simple stone with a lyre and no name at all. It reads: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. It belongs to John Keats, who died of tuberculosis in a room by the Spanish Steps in 1821, aged twenty-five, convinced that he had failed as a poet. Beside him lies his friend, the painter Joseph Severn, who nursed him to the end.
A year later, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned when his boat went down in a storm off the Tuscan coast. His body was burned on the beach at Viareggio, and according to his friends, his heart would not burn. One of them pulled it from the flames and it ended up with Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein. His ashes lie here under a stone that reads Cor Cordium... heart of hearts.
Look also for the tomb of Antonio Gramsci, the Marxist thinker who died after years in Mussolini's prisons, and for the Angel of Grief, a winged figure collapsed in despair over a tomb, carved by the American sculptor William Wetmore Story for his wife in 1894. It has been copied in cemeteries all over the world. When you leave, the great white pyramid will be right in front of you.