Mission #3: Keats-Shelley House

"Come to Rome. It is a scene by which expression is overpowered: which words cannot convey [...] It is a city of palaces and temples more glorious than those which any other city contains, and that of ruins more glorious than they."

-PB Shelley, in a letter to Thomas Peacock

Here's Rome in the rain, a view from the Spanish Steps on May Day when possibly every single Italian ever was in the baroque quarter with me, milling from one piazza to the next, all of us with guidebooks in hand, throwing coins at fountains and dropping gelato on each others' feet. Felt a lot like disneyland. The business of Rome is wandering, it seems. Let the crowd heave you along from one iconic ancient thing to the next. After placid Switzerland, this was a shock to the system. I texted my dad "Rome is ridiculous, everybody is drunk," and later realized it was a national holiday. May day! The workers day! Come to Rome! When the Shelleys were here, they lived on the Corso. Percy would go to the colossal and lonely Baths of Caracalla to write in solitude, and he finished Prometheus Unbound there in the ruin. I went to the baths today, and looked at the great red walls from outside, but the traffic was awful and I'm getting a sunburn, so I figured this was one Shelley-footstep I could leave undiscovered. (And technically, I am supposed to be tracking Mary, not Shelley, but his footsteps are easier to find than hers, since she did all the memorializing.) The Rome I'm in is much more removed from Shelley's Rome than Switzerland was, I think, and I'm not sure there are any places for solitude here today. Temples in excelsia, palazzos, monuments, and humanity, but probably not solitude. Today, Shelley would have to pay six Euros to get into the Baths of Caracalla, and once inside, contend with the comings and goings of people like me with guidebooks in hand.

Shelley

Anyway, Rome seems to belong to John Keats more than Shelley. They're both buried here in the non-Catholic cemetery (that'll be mission #4), but Keats is the one who died in this city, and his name rings louder than Shelley's (and, as usual, Mary's name hardly comes into it at all, if you go by the captions on the paintings and by the monuments). In the rainy picture above, the orangey building on the left is the Keats-Shelley House, a museum devoted to Keats, Shelley, and their circle of Romantics in the house where John Keats spent his last months and died of TB at 25. This was my first destination in Rome. It's a thoughtful exhibit on one floor of the house, made up of five rooms total. All the walls are lined with books. The girl in the giftshop greets you in English without batting an eye. The smallest room is the one Keats died in. It's remarkably simple - spare, elegant, with a blue and white painted ceiling looking just as it did in 1821, a view of the Spanish Steps and a fireplace where Severn cooked little things for Keats, who couldn't leave the bed. That room is sad and sweet. One of the windows looks across the piazza at a Gucci ad, but that's practically another timezone. Something about the wood paneling and the good curtains keeps the Keats room quiet, Gucci or no. The other four rooms are terrifically sincere, a lovestruck collection of ephemera, the common theme to all of the artifacts being a) the poets, and b) Rome. There's an Oscar Wilde letter and sonnet written to his predecessors and a quote about how sacred they made Rome, as well as one of Whitman's annotated copies of Keats' Hyperion with Whitman's own notes scrawled in the margins of the text. It's a museum devoted to footnotes and the things that prove those footnotes. A good place to feel cozy and bookish while all of Rome streams up and down the steps outside.