The Roman cemetery for those not sheltered by the Roman Catholic faith, and therefore ineligible to be buried within Rome’s walls, is idiosyncratically neighbored by an actual pyramid, constructed as his tomb by a first-century Roman magistrate named Cestius. Two centuries later it was incorporated into the city’s Aurelian walls, built at that time to withstand a new barbarian threat from the north and still sturdy enough today to buffer the cemetery from the modern city. In her (also idiosyncratic) Rome and a Villa, Eleanor Clark opens the chapter called “Beside the Pyramid” with a quotation from Keats, the most famous ineligible person buried there. The real charm of the graveyard’s quiet, walled ground, she says, is in its evidence of Rome’s “hold on the mind of the world outside Italy.” There have been so many who came to this city and stayed forever.
The bus let us off into the traffic at the Piramide stop, where we walked in the wrong direction to a point where a barred gate overlooked the Pyramid’s back garden. A sign beside a small, slotted box suggested that we might help pay for the numerous cats in residence there. We reversed direction and walked around the wall onto a quieter street, past a less ancient wall, and through the cemetery’s open gate.
The greenery there was full of sunlight, and we followed little signs into the old part of the grounds, a rather haphazardly laid out space, reminiscent of the unenclosed sheep pasture it once was. Straight ahead on the left was a bench before a pair of tombs, and beside them a trio of young people, one of them squatting to play with a gray cat. And then there it was, the famous inscription: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water Feb 24th 1821.” There were actually three graves, the poet’s companions being the painter Joseph Severn, who nursed Keats through to his death, and Severn’s young son—a smaller stone behind a little bush of deeply red roses. What pleased Keats about the prospect of burial here, says Clark, was Severn’s report of the wildflowers that grew around the grounds. She imagines as well that he would have liked the idea of sheep and goats grazing among the graves, as they still did at the time. Now, of course, there are only cats and pilgrims like ourselves, come to find the literary dead, along with these stony details of Rome’s longstanding attraction for foreigners.
In this old section one comes upon the flat tombstones of William, loved child of Percy and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and of Goethe’s undistinguished son August, who died of smallpox three weeks after his arrival in the city. It was Keats’s grave, though, that drew me again, to stroke in my turn the gray cat and to contemplate on the stone the bas relief of a lyre with two broken strings, and the further inscription added by Severn: “This Grave contains all that was Mortal of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET who on his Death Bed in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraved on his Tomb Stone Here lies” . . . etc.
It was the bitterness of his heart that I found painful, not the malicious power of his enemies, whoever they might have been, his critics, I suppose, who failed to notice a literary talent akin to Shakespeare’s emerging. I hope the bitterness was, in fact, Severn’s, grieving for his brave and brilliant friend. The water on which the name of Keats still flows is the water of the English language, inexhaustible, bubbling and flowing like the water all over Rome, in the Fontana di Trevi and the Tiber, along the great arteries of the ancient aqueducts, in a little spring deep under the church of San Clemente, from the mouths of lions and dolphins, along the gutters, and in the forecourt of the American Academy in Rome, with its two resident ducks gliding and dipping in the evening.
This old part of the cemetery is both intimate and open feeling, with its trees and monuments and flowers, its idly laid out paths among the graves. The newer part, where, in fact, is Shelley’s own grave, is very crowded, like a little city, the headstones and other markers side by side in rows going up the hill to the old wall. His ashes are tucked into a spot just beneath that wall. One of his biographers, John Addington Symonds, also ended up in the cemetery, and a grandson of William Wordsworth as well. This newer part stretches on grave after grave, densely plotted together, all the foreigners for whom Rome became their last stop: Scandinavians and Germans, Russians and Americans, sculptors and diplomats.
Richard Henry Dana ended his days here, apparently working on a book about international law . . . why not in Rome? And there was the poet Gregory Corso, who wanted to be buried near Shelley, which he is, but even nearer to him is the extravagant and implausible tombstone made by the sculptor William Wetmore Story for his wife, which quickly came to serve for his own grave as well. It shows an angel kneeling by a carved, four-sided monument, upper body prostrate across the top. One arm dangles forward, in helpless grief, with actually quite wonderful wings spread across the whole rear of the tomb, rising behind it. It’s not a bad representation of what it feels like to lose someone dear, but maybe a little flamboyantly literal for heaven’s tears.
Apparently a lot of foreigners ended up here because they came to Rome thinking it would be good for their health—the south, the sun, the life force of Italy—not expecting the chilly winters or the malarial summers. Story, though, came to Rome to make art. The son of a Supreme Court Justice, he was himself a lawyer and at first practiced art as a hobby. But the hobby became the work, and then it seemed the work would be better undertaken in Rome, where he and his family lived for the last forty years of his life, the center of a lively expatriate literary salon.
In fact, the cemetery surprised me—the crowded thoroughfares of graves, the cosmopolitan society, and the cats. At one corner in the new section, just under the wall near the Pyramid, is a narrow, curving stairway that leads down to the cat shelter, where a few volunteers were washing out some pans, busy with whatever care these apparently permanent live inhabitants of the place require. Tabbies, calicos, ginger-stripes, black and gray and variously marked, they are all plump and relaxed, quite used to visitors. A few of them were strolling the area or lying in the sun or stretching rather voluptuously and carelessly for the camera. As for the numerous others? In this post-prandial moment, sono in giro, of course: they’re out making the rounds of their fiefdom, hereditary lords of the domain of the dead.
We left the suggested donation in a box by the exit (the upkeep here relies entirely on these small but clearly steady sums) and walked beside the high wall that separates it from the neighborhood called Testaccio. Across the street were shuttered car repair shops and patches of wild grasses. Turning the corner onto the Via Nicolo Zabaglia, we passed an overgrown soccer field and then found a street where, in the late Saturday quiet, the last vendors at the covered market were closing their stands. Along the Via Alessandro Volta they were sweeping up in the salumeria, and the window of the little olive oil shop was already covered by a grate.
A year later we were back in Rome. All spring I’d been reading with a map of the city spread on my desk: the travel journals of Nathaniel and Sophia Hawthorne, the diary of John Evelyn, who was here when Bernini was alive and putting his mark all over the city (“Cavalier Bernini,” he says, was “in greatest esteeme”). And the Roman Journals of Ferdinand Gregorovius, the German historian of medieval Rome who, as a young man, found a true home in Italy. On October 3, 1852, he says, “struck by the view of the city as seen from the bridge leading to the island of Saint Bartholomew” [in the Tiber River], he decided to write what became the eight volumes of The History of Rome in the Middle Ages. “I must undertake something great, something that will lend a purpose to my life,” he wrote. He lived in Rome until 1874, through the interminable (indeed, record-breaking) papacy of Pius IX and the Franco-Prussian war (he was himself Prussian). He, too, was a member of a lively expatriate community, even as he painstakingly reconstructed the vanished world of the medieval city out of archives and libraries. In his journal he exulted in the history occurring around him: the day-by-day struggle toward a united Italy and the accompanying dissolution of the temporal papacy.
“To watch the new kingdom of Italy rising as if by magic is a marvelous sight,” he wrote in 1860, over a decade before the rabbit was actually pulled from the hat. “When time has veiled the events of the period and wiped away all that is perfidious and adventurous, Cavour, Victor Emmanuel, and Garibaldi will stand forth as heroes of this epoch. While I am writing of the struggles and sufferings of Rome in the Middle Ages, the observation of the present . . . is an experience of inestimable value to the historian.” In his journal the historian, who knows how to take a long view, perceives through the daily chaos pattern and direction; he was, of course, 100 percent right about the heroes.
In May 1863, his Norwegian friend, the historian Peter Andreas Munch, though recovering from an illness, suddenly died. Gregorovius writes, “We buried Munch at five in the afternoon beside the Pyramid of Cestius. . . . I spoke a few words and in the name of German literature laid a laurel wreath on the coffin.” Repeated mention of the Pyramid occurs at intervals in this journal, at once an acknowledgment and a circumvention, a metonym for the loss of friends whose non-Catholic arrangements for the afterlife required their burial outside the city walls. The following April he notes that an open grave at the cemetery “had just been dug and was filled with bright moonlight—an excellent funeral oration.” And in February 1866, “Gibson the celebrated sculptor, has died, and been buried beside the Pyramid of Cestius.” He adds that guns were fired over the grave, and an English lady fled to Shelley’s grave to weep.
As the decade passes, though, and he observes the steady movement toward Italian unification, he becomes more aware of his outsider status. “Rome is a world problem, which does not allow itself to be solved by Protestant criticism,” he writes. As the historic goal comes in sight, and as his own monumental work nears completion, he contemplates the loss of the city he has made his home. As the capital of a united Italy, “Rome will lose everything,” he predicted in 1861―“her republican atmosphere, her cosmopolitan breadth, her tragic repose.”
Even while thrilled by the prospect of the city’s Italian future, this non-Catholic is still overwhelmed by its ecumenical past. Walking through Rome, he says, “at every step I discovered nothing but memorials and monuments of the popes.” As one still sees today, obelisks brought from Egypt were topped with crosses, emperors’ triumphal columns crowned with St. Peter and St. Paul; there remain thousands of monuments to popes and saints, bishops and abbots: “Rome, in short, a monument of the Church at every period, from Nero and Constantine down to Pius IX.” He predicted that secular affairs would be lost within this encompassing history—“or only appearing as the hoary ruin of an earlier time,” he says, “when neither Italy nor the world was aught else than a province of Rome. . . . The King of Italy will only cut a figure here such as that of one of the Dacian prisoners of war on the triumphal arch of Trajan.”
By now the King has, of course, been replaced by a republican parliamentary system, with a president, a prime minister, a democratic citizenry. But this secular government issues from repurposed Renaissance palazzi, while every Wednesday morning the current Pope receives his massed followers in the great piazza in front of St. Peter’s. Gregorovius did not stay to be buried beside the Pyramid, but for non-Catholics fresh graves are still dug beneath the Aurelian wall. There, still, are republican atmosphere, cosmopolitan breadth, tragic repose.
Rome, city of losses: on every lively street are fragments of absence, thrilling witness to what is no more. It was almost the end of our time there, the weather grown hot and the streets thronged with tourists, and now we did not know what to do. The day before we’d had shocking news of a death at home, immediate heartbreak and loss conveyed in ghostly lines of text on my laptop. It was the same day in 1863 that Gregorovius wrote, we buried Munch beside the Pyramid.
In the early afternoon a taxi took us to the covered market in Testaccio, the big central market where you can buy produce, meat, fish, cheese, flowers, everything fresh and delicious, and also clothing and shoes and housewares, everything relatively cheap. But today the abundance felt a little flat, and we walked through it not wanting to buy anything. As we walked toward the main thoroughfare at the edge of the district, I saw that what I wanted was to visit again the Cimitero Acattolico, and so we made our way to the Pyramid and into the quiet green space of non-Catholic memorials.
Here it was cool, and we were quite at random among the graves, noting now the various ways the foreign dead were at home in this city of memories. A city of lost history, and like the rest of Rome, an eclectic one. On a wall near the entrance was a plaque to the memory of Sarah Parker Remond, “African American Abolitionist & Physician,” who died in Rome in 1894, following a life of eloquent activism, a medical career, and an Italian marriage. The losses here were met with sweet peace, with well-tended trees and bushes, elaborately carved stones and passionate declarations of love and respect and admiration for vanished life. Sunlight falling on the emotions of the past, on grief and idealization, on urgent farewells. There were actually grave stelae with relief images of family members saying farewell, as on stelae from antiquity—efforts to keep the fact of death somehow within the bearability of tradition. On one of these, as the dead succeeded one another, their names were added: Angela in 1907, Eleanora in 1949, Francesco in 1974, Arnoldo in 1986. I moved at random toward the church in the far corner of the cemetery, and then to the grave nearby of Antonio Gramsci, Marxist hero, imprisoned by Mussolini to shut him up, dead at the age of forty-six. Here by the boundary wall were pots of flowers, a sinuous tree, the nubbly gravestone saying simply “Gramsci” and the dates.
Without purpose, I meandered up among the Danes, the Russians, the expats of all nations. Diplomats and soldiers, artists and musicians, loved wives and husbands, children lost. There was an amazing sepulcher for a man named Robert Finch, who might have been famous but was instead just a wonderful person. His wife, evidently not short of funds, put up a miniature version of an English cathedral, perched above a fulsome engraved account of his many virtues. On Wikipedia Finch is remembered as an antiquarian and peripheral member of Shelley’s circle. A Frank Leslie Timings, from Birmingham, England, dead at twenty-four, has a stone on which the chosen sentiment was “in fragrant memory,” which does make you wonder. And for Sarah Greenough, a statue of Psyche divesting herself of mortality.
In the old section of the cemetery, near Keats’s grave, there are still some wisteria in bloom, and a Red Admiral flutters among the violets. In the near distance the Pyramid is screened by the trees, only its peak visible against unbroken blue sky; the umbrella pines overhead appear to reach above it. A sign forbids the scattering of ashes by the poet’s grave (or anywhere in the cemetery), and in an effort to encourage new growth of the much-trodden grass in front of it a bit of string hangs between little metal rods as a makeshift fence.
The 5:00 p.m. closing was announced by music floating over the graves, and we walked back into Testaccio, into piazzas where children were playing, and the church of Santa Maria Liberatrice rose behind the trees. It did not seem possible our friend at home had just been divested of her lovely earthly mortal self. We bought some stuffed tomatoes and artichokes and waited for the bus that would take us back to our current temporary digs, in this cat-loving city of monuments, and palaces, and water.
