Born in England, Buried in Rome

The gravesites of two of the most esteemed British poets of the early nineteenth century, John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, were among the earliest to grace what has been known for much of its three-century history as Rome's Protestant Cemetery, otherwise known in Italian as the Cimitero Acattolico. Neither Romantic poet lived in Rome for long. Having passed through in November 1818, Shelley and his wife Mary returned from Naples to Rome the following March, residing there through the early summer of 1819, then moving north to Livorno. Keats likewise arrived by way of Naples and lived in Rome between mid-November 1820 and his death from tuberculosis a few months later. When Shelley's drowned body washed up on the Tyrrhenian shore in the summer of 1822, a friend arranged a cenotaph to be erected nearby his fellow poet's grave. The fatality of such coincidence, augmenting the deserved regard of these two poets, has secured their stories within the physical memory of Rome and drawn numerous pilgrims to the gravesites. Shelley's long elegiac poem for Keats, which commemorates the only slightly younger poet's final resting place, and the institution of the Keats-Shelley Museum at Keats's rooms on the Piazza di Spagna, are cultural anchors.

A Non-Catholic Cemetery in Catholic Rome

After the Irish writer Oscar Wilde visited Italy in 1877, he commented that the Cimitero Acattolico was “the holiest place in Rome.” The sense of this quip should not be ascribed entirely to Wilde's wry wit, however. For as numerous visitors have experienced over several centuries, the pine-and-cypress-shaded site has a special spirit. Two very different tutelary masses rise above each narrow end of the otherwise fairly level rectangular sward. To the east is the geometrically precise Pyramid of Cestius, dating to the first century BCE. To the west is the roughly coeval mound of debris known as Monte Testaccio, a hill built up from fifty million or so amphorae discarded there during the early centuries of the Roman Empire.

At the time of its institution as a cemetery for non-Catholics, the site's most influential recommendation may have been its removal from the city's centre and its pejorative association with the heaped refuse of Testaccio.