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Look up the word “elegiac” in the dictionary and by all rights there should be a picture of Rome’s Protestant Cemetery, since the early eighteenth century one of the oldest burial grounds in continuous use in Europe and one of the most peaceful corners in Rome. From the busy street passing by it, the nondescript wall surrounding the cemetery gives no hint of the tranquil oasis contained within, shaded by tall cypresses and pine trees and populated by non-feral cats sunning themselves on the verdant lawn or on some of the larger graves. The cemetery abuts against the towering Pyramid of Cestius, once a burial site itself and on the “bucket list” of travelers on the Grand Tour in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Part of the enclosing wall is a segment of the massive third-century Aurelian Wall, built with impressive battlements to protect Rome from the barbarians, which it ultimately did not. Immediately next to the pyramid is the hulking Porta San Paolo, one of the ancient gates built into the Aurelian Wall.

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The Protestant Cemetery is located in Testaccio, the rione or district adjacent to the Aventine. Today a quiet residential and business area, in ancient times Testaccio was site of a huge mound composed of discarded amphorae, or terracotta jars, sort of like an urban garbage site. The Romans used amphorae for transporting and storing olive oil, wine, and foodstuffs such as honey, olives, dried fish, dried fruit, and cereals, and not being biodegradable, their disposal was always a problem. Despite the overgrowth of vegetation over the millennia, the mound can still be seen in the distance from the entranceway to the cemetery, which is on a quiet side street off the main road. When the cemetery opened in the early 1700s, it was isolated in rural countryside, surrounded by pastures, vineyards, and the occasional inn and tavern. This part of Rome was then part of the disabitato, the large swath of the once densely populated ancient city that had been abandoned from the sixth century onward as Rome dwindled to a small fraction of its once one million inhabitants, with the remaining population huddled in the center of the city in hovels carved into ancient ruins. From the late nineteenth century onward, Rome rapidly expanded to fill in the disabitato, and today the cemetery is encircled by congested streets and tram tracks—the busy Ostiense train station is nearby, and commuters rush about, seemingly unconcerned, as many Italians can be, about the ancient pyramid and wall before them that encloses what Oscar Wilde, the nineteenth-century writer, once described as “the holiest place in Rome.”

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However, when it had its first burial in the early 1700s, the cemetery wasn’t regarded as holy or even a place most Romans would visit, except to overturn the tombstones. Because Protestants were forbidden burial in the city, the Church decreed that they should be interred at its periphery, along the Aurelian wall, where prostitutes and executed criminals were dumped. Not far away was also the official cemetery for Rome’s Jews, another group of outcasts. For centuries, the Protestant Cemetery was the only place where Protestants and other non-Catholics could be buried. Up until 1870, when Italy became united as a nation, the Catholic Church required these burials to be held well after sunset, to prevent the occasional unrest and riots that reportedly occurred during burials of Protestants, who were regarded as heretics. Vandalization of the cemetery’s graves was also not uncommon, since a wall wasn’t built around it until 1900. In addition, the Church stipulated that tomb epitaphs and decorations, which had to be approved by a special papal commission, could not allude to—or even remotely hint of--salvation or any hope for eternal life, since such things were only possible through the Church. Even crosses were proscribed. Back then, Rome was the absolute and sole fiefdom of the Roman Catholic Church, which still nursed the wounds of the endless religious wars of the Reformation. When the Italian nation came into being in 1870—the unification was a messy affair, with complex alliances, political intrigues, and many battles--the Church lost its valuable lands around Rome. The pope angrily retreated to the Vatican, excommunicating Italy’s new king, Victor Immanuel II, who was Italy’s George Washington. (In fairness to His Holiness, the pope did rescind the excommunication when the king was on his deathbed.) The pope didn’t end his self-imposed exile until the 1929 concordant between the Church and Mussolini. By then, the Protestant Cemetery was starting to fill up and its environs were teeming with cars, businesses, and apartment buildings.

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As with many places in Rome, there are no signs or directions to the cemetery entrance, which is set back from the street and framed by a large unadorned gate. Numerous pine and cypress trees rise up behind the entrance, a welcoming harbinger that anticipates the paradise on the other side, a contrast to the car repair shops directly across the street. As soon as you pass through the entranceway, the outside street noise dissipates into the singing of birds, and an almost surreal calm envelops you. The wafting fragrances of the plants, flowers, and shrubs deepen this tranquility. Not without good reason, the early nineteenth century English poet Percy Shelly once mused that the heaven-like tranquility and beauty of the cemetery “might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.” Shortly thereafter he drowned and was buried there. Directly before you, an incline gently slopes down from the Aurelian wall, which is carpeted with rows and rows of seemingly innumerable graves and monuments of all kinds, densely packed together and extending to your right almost into infinity. Numerous pine trees tower over the graves, and abundant lush vegetation springs between them. The walkways between the rows of graves are bordered by trimmed hedges. This is the more recent part of the cemetery, populated with people from the nineteenth century on. On the other side of the small wall to your left is the oldest part of the cemetery, which is right next to the pyramid and has far fewer graves. This part of the cemetery appears more as it did in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when it was an open grassy meadow. Immediately inside the entrance is a small box for donations—the cemetery receives no support from Rome, and burial and maintenance fees for the tombs don’t cover the cost of keeping it afloat.  

The cemetery’s official name is the Non-Catholic Cemetery for Foreigners, since many of its 4000 or so graves contain the remains of not only Protestants but also Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslins, Buddhists, Confucians, and not a few atheists—the tombstone inscriptions are in over fifteen languages. The first recorded burial was in 1738, of a young Englishman, an Oxford University student who was reportedly was killed when he fell off a horse, and over the centuries he was followed by a procession of many of his countrymen, the most famous of whom were John Keats and Shelley. Indeed, for a while the cemetery was referred to as the “Englishman’s Cemetery,” since Rome was a magnet for English writers, poets, historians, artists, and many young men of well-to-do circumstances whose fathers set them out on the “Grand Tour” of the continent, which was felt to be a requirement of upper-class education. Although English and German graves are the most numerous, today there is a rainbow of nationalities that include scientists, diplomats, architects, and sculptors, many of them famous and all of them bound together by their having once lived in Rome. Indeed, the American-British author Henry James (1843-1916) once described Rome as “The Mecca of artists,” many of whom settled there for good. According to the official website of the cemetery, burials continue to this day, but you must be a non-Catholic citizen of “a select group of countries” and “effectively resident” in Italy at the time of death. The website (www.cemeteryrome.it) also has a link to its database of people buried there.

However, unless you are a genealogist or historian, you will want to explore the new part of the cemetery on your own, leisurely strolling up and down the narrow pathways, randomly inspecting the grave markers, which range from small flat slabs flush with the ground to grand artistic monuments rising high above more modest graves. Among the latter, one of the most notable ones is the “Angel of Grief”—a life-sized angel has collapsed prostrate over an altar, head bowed down in fathomless sorrow, a stark image of helpless and exhausted mourning over the death of the sculptor’s wife in 1894. The angel’s abject lack of hope--of even salvation in the afterlife--is almost palpable in William Story’s iconic representation of grief. A replica of “Angel of Grief” at Stanford University memorializes the victims of San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake. Nearby is another monument, almost as impressive as the deceased’s name, Devereux Plantagenet Cockburn, who died in 1850 at age 21 of an unknown illness—probably tuberculosis—for which he traveled to different lands for a cure, finally dying in Rome. The life-size sculpture atop the sarcophagus depicts him lying on his side on a large pillow, dressed in upper class English garb and partially wrapped in a blanket, holding a small book, his little cocker spaniel nestled up beside him. His epitaph celebrates his “deep and unpretending piety” and “rare mental and corporeal endowments,’ noting that he was “beloved of all who knew him” and “most precious to his parents and family.” Even today, over a century and a half later, long after his mourners had joined him in death, the pain of their loss remains acute and raw. Indeed, the silent voices and elegies of the bereaved echo throughout the Protestant Cemetery, their eloquence, melancholy, and admonitions speaking to us even today. One of the largest graves has a carved relief of an angel lifting up a teenage girl named Rosa who drowned in the early nineteenth century when she was riding her horse near the Tiber during a flash flood—as her mother noted on the monument, the tragic accident was due "to the swollen river and the spirited state of her horse." The mother’s grief didn’t end there—her husband vanished “on a special mission” to Vienna. The woman concludes her litany of sorrows by speaking directly to us: "Who may pause to peruse this tale of sorrows let this awful lesson of the instability of human happiness sink into thy mind." And a few of the grave markings remind us even more vividly of our own impending mortality during our holiday in the Eternal City--the unadorned tomb of William Harding of Scarboro, who died in 1821 at age 31, notes that he died "while making a tour through Italy to see its curiosities of nature and art, ancient and modern." Although there are no accurate statistics, it is safe to say that of the approximately 10 million tourists visiting Rome each year, many hundreds, perhaps thousands, breathed their last in the city, victims of heart attacks, strokes, heat exhaustion, the occasional fatal pedestrian accident, and such.

The legions of graves in the newer part of the cemetery can seem overwhelming, stretching to the right of the entrance almost as far as the eye can see. It would take at least several days to inspect all the graves, so a leisurely stroll is the best approach. Fortunately, there are many benches for resting and musing.

To the left of the entrance, just beyond the gift shop (and convenient bathroom) and on the other side of the small wall--it had been built centuries ago to keep vandals out--is the meadow-like old cemetery, containing far fewer graves, most from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the best known being those of Keats and Shelley. This area gives the best idea of what the cemetery looked like in the first century or so of its existence—rural and isolated in the pastures of the disabitato, the only nearby structures being the towering Pyramid of Cestius and the hulking, forlorn Aurelian wall which in the third century had incorporated the pyramid and the adjacent Porta San Paolo. Today, the pyramid is best seen from the old cemetery, since busy traffic makes viewing from the street difficult. There are ample wooden benches to rest on and muse upon this pointed sentinel from over two thousand years ago that over the past three centuries has silently witnessed burials in the cemetery.

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Built by Caius Cestius between 18 and 12 B.C. as his tomb—one of its inscriptions boasts that it took only 330 days--the pyramid is 118 feet high and 97 feet wide and is actually the fourth tallest one in the world, only after the three massive ones in Gizeh, Egypt. After Rome conquered Egypt in 30 B.C., the Romans became enamored of Egyptian style, and for centuries afterward obelisks were shipped from Egypt to Rome to adorn temples, palaces, the Circus Maximus, and tombs. The brick and concrete structure of Cestius’s pyramid is covered with fine marble slabs, and the tip is steeper and more sharply pointed than those in Gizeh. Some scholars have proposed that earlier in his life Cestius might have been an officer in the Roman army that conquered Nubia, a kingdom in northeastern Africa, south of Egypt, where the pyramids were also steeply pointed. In the interior is a small chamber with badly faded frescos—when the chamber was initially excavated in the 1600s, they were much more brilliant, but they have dimmed over the ensuing centuries. At first, Cestius’s tomb stood well outside of the city—burials within the city limits were prohibited, and there were probably other spectacular tombs nearby, each one an attempt by its occupant or their heirs to leave a memorable record in marble and stone. The pyramid was surrounded by a low wall, and bronze statues adorned the approach to it. But its isolation quickly ended, and from the first century on, the rapid outward growth of Rome soon engulfed it. In the 270s, when Emperor Aurelian hastily ringed Rome with his massive walls, the pyramid was incorporated into it, thereby ensuring its survival through the vicissitudes of the Dark Ages and the rapaciousness of Renaissance popes—a similar pyramid tomb near the Vatican, in the Middle Ages dubbed the Pyramid of Romulus, was taken apart in the sixteenth century to provide marble for the new St. Peter’s Basilica, by some accounts for the front steps. Were it not for Aurelian’s architects, a similar fate would almost certainly have befallen Cestius’s memorial, as was the case for other tombs around it. As Rome collapsed and contracted from the sixth century on, the pyramid once again stood in splendid solitude, heavily overgrown by vegetation, its once gleaming marble surface slowly disintegrating, its origins soon forgotten and of no interest to anyone, although people back then said it was the Pyramid of Remus, to complement the tomb of Romulus, above. In the 1660s, Pope Alexander VII undertook an excavation of the pyramid, burrowing into the burial chamber and uncovering ancient inscriptions on its the east and west sides which recorded the name and grandiloquent titles of the deceased, how long it took to build, and names of his heirs. As popes were wont to do, Alexander recorded his own name on another side of the pyramid to commemorate his munificence. Despite the pope’s excavations and restoration, a print from the mid-1700s showed the pyramid in shabby condition, with plants and other vegetation growing up its sides, although the artist, Piranesi, tended to embellish the decay of Rome’s ancient monuments to create a romantic effect.

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So who exactly was Cestius, whose name will live on in perpetuity, or at least as long as Rome exists? That he was wealthy is a given, and according to inscriptions on the bases of bronzes that decorated his mausoleum, he had valuable tapestries, perhaps ones he acquired in the Nubian campaign, which he wanted interred with him but which probably had to be sold after his death to pay for his tomb. The inscription on the pyramid says he was a priest or magistrate responsible for arranging feasts for the numerous festivals and games held for the masses in Rome. It is possible that he was the official responsible for building the Ponte Cestio, the bridge connecting Tiber Island with Trastevere, still in use today. He lived at a time of relative peace, when Rome, having conquered much of the Mediterranean world, was benignly ruled by its first and most famous emperor, Augustus. So life was probably good for Cestius, and like many Romans of his class and status, he wanted to leave something substantial behind, a monument that would make people after him take notice and wonder who he was. But other than his pyramid and his titles carved onto it, we really don’t know much about this man.

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In his pensive poem, “Rome at the Pyramid of Cestius Near the Graves of Shelly and Keats” (1887), the renowned English writer Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) also asked the same question before us, “Who then is Cestius, And what is he to me?” Like many artists and writers of the time who had come to Rome, Hardy visited the Protestant Cemetery to pay homage to these two great English poets, and mused how Cestius and his pyramid, after nearly 2000 years of anonymity, finally achieved “an ample fame” in “beckoning pilgrim feet with marble finger high to where, by shadowy wall and history-haunted street, those matchless singers lie.” One wonders how this upper level functionary of the Roman state would react to such fulsome, posthumous fame.  

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Without doubt, the most famous graves in the Protestant Cemetery are those of John Keats and Percy Shelly, who, along with Lord Byron, were the beacons of early nineteenth-century English poetry. Indeed, their works to this day speak to our deepest intentions and hopes. Although adored by his small group of friends in England, Keats never achieved popular fame in his lifetime. Ironically, soon after his death, the trajectory of his fame took off, and he was regarded by many as England’s new Shakespeare. The bitter disappointment followed him to the grave, when he died of tuberculosis in Rome at age 25 in early 1821. Unlike Shelly, whose biography recounts many instances of callousness and shameless womanizing, Keats, in addition to being a poetic genius, was probably a good person with a gentle soul, lending money to friends when he himself was in debt and devotedly nursing his younger brother dying from tuberculosis at the expense of pursing a young woman he was in love with. Coming from modest background and never attending any upper-crust universities—he even trained as a doctor and pharmacist before finally committing himself totally to his poetry--Keats was regarded as low-brow by the class-conscious reviewers of his poetry. Perhaps his aesthetic can best be summarized when he wrote, "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of the imagination. What imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth." Later he would memorialize this consuming vision in the closing of "Ode on a Grecian Urn": "'Beauty is truth, truth beauty' – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."  When he developed serious symptoms of tuberculosis in early 1820, his doctors in England had advised the move to Rome to improve his health, a commonly prescribed antidote back then—more than a few denizens of the cemetery ended up in Rome for the same reason. Keats was accompanied by Joseph Severn, an English painter a few years older than Keats, who at the time was only an acquaintance. But Severn stayed with Keats to the very end, nursing him and reporting back to Keats’s friends and fiancée every detail of his illness and eventual death, which, if it was anything like that of the hundreds of patients with AIDS and TB I cared for in Africa, was probably not a pretty sight. Keats’s modest grave is in the most distant corner of the old cemetery, surrounded by lush foliage. At the top of the slab is a lyre with broken strings, beneath which is the epitaph, which he composed himself, reflecting his sadness at dying unrecognized for his genius: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Severn, who lived until 1879 after a very successful career as a painter, is buried next to Keats, with the epitaph “Devoted friend and deathbed companion of John Keats.” His tombstone is engraved with a painter’s palette. Next to Severn’s marker is the grave of his infant son who died in 1837. With today’s voyeuristic hypersensitivities about sexuality, some might raise an eyebrow about two young men so intimately connected—they shared a bed on the long voyage from England, and Severn’s heartrending accounts of caring for Keats in his last days are reminiscent of a man caring for his lover dying of AIDS in the 1980s. But back then, close friendships, even romantic but nonsexual love, between young men of similar aesthetic and artistic sensibilities were common.

Keats had a fiancée whom he pined for on his deathbed, and Severn married later in life and even had had an illegitimate son before he left for Rome with Keats. Some people have questioned Severn’s motives in accompanying Keats to Rome, contending that he really wasn’t a close friend at the time and was trying to advance his artistic career on the back of Keats. As with most of us, Severn’s motives were probably mixed, and because the Royal Academy had just awarded him a scholarship to study abroad, and because Keats’s friends in England either couldn’t or wouldn’t accompany him to Rome, Severn probably felt this was a chance to be a nice guy and, like many before him, immerse himself in the art of the Eternal City. And it is possible that once he became completely involved in caring for Keats, his love and devotion for him blossomed.

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Percy Shelly’s grave is nearby—he died in 1827 at the age of 29. His tragic death, by all accounts totally preventable, was emblematic of the contradictory beliefs about our eventual demises that are hard-wired into our psyches: our awareness of our mortality versus our irrational conviction that death, while inevitable and irrevocable, will happen sometime far into the future and certainly not today or next month or even next year. Against the warning of his friends and aware that he couldn’t swim, he set sail off the coast of Italy as a storm was approaching, and his boat sank. When his body washed ashore, they cremated it due to quarantine laws, although at the penultimate moment his friend Edward Trelawny, an adventurer of note, reportedly snatched his heart and gave it to his wife, who, again reportedly, kept it wrapped in paper in a drawer, eventually returning it to his grave. Appropriately, his tomb epitaph has a quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.” A reflection of their own “bromance,” Trelawny is buried next to his friend. Shelly’s life was even more convoluted than Keats’s, with numerous affairs and marriages—he lived life on the edge, as his ill-fated boat outing proved. Most of his poetry wasn’t published widely during his lifetime, because his political views, at least for the times, were very radical, and the elite were horrified by his uncompromising views on class and even the monarchy. As but one example, his refusal to renounce his atheism got him expelled from Oxford—when one British newspaper announced his death, it chortled that “now he knows whether there is a God or no.” Posthumously his works influenced notables such as Karl Marx, George Bernard Shaw, and Bertrand Russell, as well as the great and the mighty of Western—and Eastern—literature. Shelly traveled extensively in Italy, often leaving large unpaid rent bills in his wake, and in Rome he completed Prometheus Unbound, his masterful interpretation of a lost ancient Greek play. In tribute to Keats, whom he greatly admired—a book of Keats’s poems was found in his coat pocket before he was cremated—he wrote the poem Adonais. 

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Yet despite their compelling biographies, Keats and Shelley’s remarkable lives are but microscopic specs in the infinite universes of other residents of the Protestant Cemetery, to say nothing of humankind itself. Even the dead interred in monumental tombs had hopes and fears no more significant than those of the nameless servants who attended them in life. The myriad emotions of the people in this cemetery—their loves, their hopes, their joys, their fears, their anguish—are unfathomable, and should put our own feelings into proper perspective. The mournful inscriptions on the tombs here, from the striking monuments to the simple slabs almost buried in the ground, reverberate through the centuries, much like those on ancient Roman tombs millennia ago. A stroll through any cemetery, especially one as beautiful as this one, is an existential challenge for those of us who try to lead a life of self-examination. Too often we gaze on the tombs of the dead with a false bravura, confident that we understand the meaning and lessons of such a place. Instead, we should approach the Protestant Cemetery with humility and grace, so that when sickness and infirmity strike, when the acute awareness of our own impending mortality strikes, we can return to the beauty and calm of this small plot in Rome.   

There are many places in Rome where the din of traffic and rush of a busy international city dissipate into peaceful tranquility, allowing the weary traveler to stop and rest, to take stock of their visit, and of themselves. The Protestant Cemetery is probably the most rarified and sanctified of these oases of calm. Sitting in the shade, you feel an incredible inertia, a desire to linger as long as possible, despite the pull of other sites beckoning to you.