Protestant Cemetery in Rome

It's Not a graveyard "whatever" but the Protestant Cemetery
in Rome.
The Church in the'600 and'700, forbade non-Catholics (as well as suicides, prostitutes and actors) to be buried in Christian territory, so had to create new areas where buried, rigorously at night, those bodies, just outside the city walls.
For this reason existed at the time, a cemetery of the actors (at Porta Pinciana)
and one of the Jews (in the area where now stands the Municipal Rose Garden, on the Aventine hill).

The cemetery which I will speak accomodates "non-Catholic" of all nationalities: Italian (Gadda; Gramsci), American (Corso, poet of the Beat Generation, Simmons, sculptor and painter; Wetmore, sculptor, author of the wonderful "Angel of pain"), Russian Chinese Greek and mostly German (Goethe's son, the architect Semper) and English (Severn, American consul in Rome and a friend of Keats, next to which is buried).

Among the refined paths, surrounded by green hedges, pine and cypress trees you can see the graves of John Keats (1795 - 1821, died of tuberculosis in Rome, and Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822) sunk with his ship in the waters of Tuscany. His tomb is in the shadow of the Aurelian Walls.
A particularly romantic, although little 'macabre, relates to his death: his body was cremated
at Viareggio but his friend Trelawny "pulled" his heart from the flame of his and led it to his widow, Mary (famous author of novel Frankenstein).

The cemetery, lies between the Porta San Paolo (formerly called Ostiensis), the Pyramid of Caius Cestius, the Aurelian Walls and the Monte Testaccio.



The site, also widely known as the Protestant Cemetery , is one of the oldest burial grounds in continuous use
In Europe. It is a great and suggestive place to visit I strongly recommend

It is hard to think of another urban site quite so glorious.

Its towering cypress trees and abundant flowers and greenery shelter a heterogeneity of elaborate and eclectic graves and monuments.



"It might make one in love with death, to think that
one should be buried in so sweet a place" wrote Shelley, not long before he drowned and was buried here.