Non-Catholic Cemetery Site Features

John Keats

He died in Rome of tuberculosis at twenty-five, in 1821. His epitaph, written by his friends Joseph Severn and Charles Armitage Brown, never names him: "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 engraven on his tombstone: Here lies one whose name was writ in water." Severn is buried here too.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Drowned in 1822 off the Italian Riviera, with a borrowed copy of Keats's poetry doubled back in his pocket. Cremated on the beach near Viareggio; his ashes were interred here months later. The stone reads Cor cordium — heart of hearts — and then three lines from The Tempest: "Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea change, Into something rich and strange." His three-year-old son William is buried here as well.

The Angel of Grief

William Wetmore Story carved it over the grave he shares with his wife Emelyn. A winged figure thrown face-down across the tomb — one of the most copied funerary sculptures in the world, and the reason many people come.

Antonio Gramsci

The Italian philosopher and Communist Party leader, who died in 1937 after years of Fascist imprisonment. A small, plain stone, and rarely without flowers.

The pyramid behind the wall

The Pyramid of Cestius, built between 18 and 12 BCE, rising out of the Aurelian Walls immediately behind the graves. It is what makes the place photograph like nowhere else on earth.

The cats

They live in and around the cemetery, fed and cared for by the volunteers of I Gatti della Piramide, the charity that runs the cat sanctuary next to the Pyramid.

The others

The Russian painter Karl Briullov. August von Goethe, the poet's son, under a medallion by Bertel Thorvaldsen. Rosa Bathurst, drowned in the Tiber at sixteen, under a monument by Richard Westmacott. The sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen, whose Rome house is now a museum of the Galleria Nazionale. The Beat poet Gregory Corso. The novelists Carlo Emilio Gadda, Luce d'Eramo and Andrea Camilleri. Giorgio Napolitano, President of Italy.