The Protestant Cemetery

This walled cemetery in the middle of a busy Roman suburb, contains the graves of some of the world’s most important scholars and artists. The English poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley are buried here, as are the Scottish surgeon John Bell and Australian novelist Martin Boyd.

More properly called the Non-Catholic Cemetery for Foreigners, the site contains the graves not only of Protestants but those of Orthodox Christians, Jews and Muslims as well.

It’s a peaceful place. Names carved in stone are shaded by tall cypress pines and surrounded by flowering camellias. They came here from all corners of the globe, from England, Germany and Denmark, Israel, Norway and Canada. They were philosophers, sculptors and writers, historians, explorers and architects.

Over hundreds of years, Italy attracted and inspired the world’s great intellectual and creative thinkers. Some names in the Protestant Cemetery are well-known, many are familiar. It’s a powerful reminder of the enduring legacies of those men and women who are buried here.

The site is one of the oldest in Europe to have been in continuous use as a cemetery

Records show the first burials took place here in 1716

The Protestant Cemetery is private and administered by a board of foreign ambassadors

Tombs in the cemetery are inscribed in more than fifteen languages

The English poet Shelley was 29 when he drowned off the Italian coast in 1822; Shelley had previously visited the cemetery and said of it at the time 'It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place'

John Keats was suffering from tuberculosis when he travelled to Italy in 1820; he died in Rome the following year aged 25; next to Keats' grave is that of his close friend, the painter John Severn, who nursed Keats during his final months

Keats' unmarked grave includes the epithet 'Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water'; Keats had little literary success during his lifetime and felt he'd been treated harshly by critics

Julius August von Goethe (1789-1830) was the only one of Goethe's children to survive to adulthood; his father was distraught when Julius died aged 41

The grave of William Wordsworth's grandson, Edward, who died in 1845 aged 4

The American sculptor William Wetmore Story (1819-1895) lived in Rome for 40 years; the beautiful 'Angel of Grief' was Wetmore's tribute to his late wife

The burial pyramid of Caius Cestius (18-12 BC) is a landmark in a quiet corner of the cemetery; in 3 AD the pyramid was incorporated into Rome's Aurelian Walls and formed part of the city's defenses

Oscar Wilde described the Protestant Cemetery as 'the holiest place in Rome'; certainly, whatever your faith or beliefs, a visit to this lovely place is worth the experience