The protestant cemetery of Rome

Immediately behind the Pyramid, at Via Caio Cestio, 6, are the grounds of what’s commonly known as the Protestant cemetery. Strictly speaking, it’s the Cimetero Acattolico per gli Stranieri, the non-Catholic cemetery for Foreigners: the Catholic Church prohibited the burial of non-Catholics in Catholic cemeteries in Rome, so from the eighteenth century, non-Catholic visitors to Rome who died in the Eternal City-most of them from England-were buried here. In addition to good Anglicans, a number of prominent disbelievers are buried here, including Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Italian Communist Party and the novelist Carlo Emilio Gadda, author of That Awful Mess on Via Merulana, often referred to as the Roman Ulysses. Most famously, of course, the cemetery plays host to the remains of young English poets Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats, whose gravestones are the frequent subject of rubbings by smitten poetic types. Not quite as popular as Keats and Shelley, but still famous, are the graves of Richard Henry Dana, author of Two Years Before the Mast, William Wetmore Story, American sculptor and man-about-town (the angel above adorns his late wife’s tombstone), and Goethe’s illegitimate son Julius. Rounding out the pack is Henry James’s eponymous Daisy Miller, who succumbed to the malarial air of the Colosseum at night, came to her fictional rest here as well. That’s not accidental: a walk around the manicured grounds of the Protestant cemetery soon reveals a whole history of expatriate life in Rome, mostly by the ever-colonial British, but with occasional incursions of Americans, Russians, and others. The cemetery is a strangely beautiful place (despite all the dead people), and it also serves as a cat sanctuary.

The cemetery is open daily from 9am-5pm; though admission is free, a donation is expected.

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