Rambles in Switzerland and Italy: Mission #4: the Non-Catholic Cemetery

A marker pointing the way to Shelley's tomb.

Best cemetery I ever saw was the brush and tumbleweed number on the top of a Colorado ridge where Doc Holliday is buried. You can't get there by car, you have to scale the mountain, and the top of the mountain is studded with knobs of stone and graves arranged haphazardly in the roots of hardweather pines and difficult mountain scrub. That grave was littered with playing cards and half-empty bottles of Jameson - hollywood tributes for a man we only remember because of celluloid. And all around you, 360 degrees of sky, sky, sky

Much more stately, but equally unassuming, was Percy Shelley's single stone, laid flat in a bed of lavender, in the Non-Catholic Cemetery for Foreigners in Rome, which was my primary reason for coming South to Italy. In this most Catholic of cities beloved by artists and international travelers of all creeds, there is one spot in a neighborhood called the Testaccio where Rome's cultural descendents can be buried. You find writers inside, sculptors, Goethe's son, a German poet, unknown Americans; all manner of ex-pats, collected in a crumbling brick wall beside a 12th century pyramid which comes complete with digging archeologists and colony of cats. These are the graves of people who were never home at home, and so found this city; people who didn't mind the term foreigner, even welcomed it. In short: romantics. “She loved this place,” it said on one of the American graves. Another had an American poet I haven't heard of who died at 25 in the 1970's and was put here by his parents. Another was a complete statue of a life-sized boy of about 9 sitting on top of a pedestal, thoughtfully, as though waiting for his homework assignment, but stone.

Portrait of Keats' grrave with the Pyramide.

And here you find first Keats in the ancient section just by the pyramid, then in the newer section, under a crenelated tower in the cemetery wall there's Shelley, who wrote of Keats' grave, "It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place." These days, they're surrounded by major thoroughfares in an unremarkable section of the city off the tourist track, but it's only two subway stops away from the center, and it's a simple walk over from Aventine Hill. The trees inside the walls have spread and grown so it's shady on these graves and the Pyramid doesn't dominate the picture the way it would have back then. Keats has an extra plaque in addition to his stone with the lyre on it. Shelley has no monuments, but does sit adjacent to the most stunning stone in the cemetery, an undone angel collapsed over a stone, carved by a sculptor for his wife in the plot where they are both buried. Beat poet Gregory Corso is on the next row down from Shelley. And Edward Trelawney, poet and friend of Shelley's is buried in the plot with Shelley.

You stand there and think "here lies the poet," but he's not really in there. Italian law required Shelley's body to be cremated immediately after discovery on the shores of the Bay of Lerici where he drowned at age 29. His ashes were brought here, to Rome, but they kept his heart from the cremation, and after a bit of a tussle with another poet, the heart was given to Mary, who kept it in a box all her life. In Daisy Hay's excellent group biography of all these people, Young Romantics, she speculates that it's probable the heart was not in fact a heart, but some less symbolic organ. Gory, but these sorts of details make all those old writers seem more real to me. Romanticism was a group dream, made real only in the imaginations of those who chose to dream it together and tried their best to live it, and all that living wore them out. The real truth of the matter is you cannot hold a heart in a box, and wanderlust is hard on the body. He was just a few months shy of his thirtieth birthday when he died, and you wonder what he would have been like if he'd lived into more temperate years.

Shelley's grave.

I was surprised to find him in a such a simple spot. There's hardly even room to stand and look. A simple footpath. You have to move over if anybody else passes through, which a few did. I wondered if they were Italians on strolls or English-speakers on pilgrimages. A few Germans approached and their guide explained to them about the poet in German. They nodded, consulted their pamphlets and moved on. I hadn't thought to bring any playing cards or literary tribute with me - soak his grave in absinthe? - so went to my journal and pulled out the flowers I had pressed in the park at Cologny next to Villa Diodati, and left those on the corner of the stone. A piece of Switzerland - maybe not Shelley's poetic home - but certainly Mary's. I left them on the end of the quote from the Tempest inscribed at the bottom of the stone.