Protestant Cemetery

Oscar Wilde called this "the holiest place in Rome." Shelley said it made him "in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place." These are suspiciously similar endorsements from two men who knew what they were talking about, and they are both correct. The Non-Catholic Cemetery (its official name) is a walled garden at the foot of the Pyramid of Cestius, full of cypress trees, stray cats, and the graves of some of the most interesting people to die in Rome over the past three centuries.

John Keats is here, buried under a tombstone that reads "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water" — his own requested epitaph. He was twenty-five. His friend Joseph Severn, who nursed him through his final months, is buried next to him — but Severn died fifty-eight years later, at the age of eighty-five, having spent the rest of his long life basically trading on the association. Shelley is also here, though technically what is buried is his heart. His body was cremated on the beach at Viareggio in 1822, but his friend Edward Trelawny snatched the heart from the pyre. It was eventually given to Mary Shelley, who kept it wrapped in silk in her desk for decades.

The cemetery also contains the grave of Antonio Gramsci, the Marxist philosopher who wrote his most important works from a fascist prison. Mussolini's prosecutor had declared at his trial: "We must stop this brain from functioning for twenty years." Gramsci died in 1937, six days after his release from prison. His tomb is one of the most visited in the cemetery, often covered in fresh flowers and small red flags.

The Pyramid of Cestius right next door is a thirty-six-metre marble pyramid built as a tomb for a Roman magistrate around 12 BC. It is one of the best-preserved ancient buildings in Rome, partly because it was incorporated into the Aurelian Walls in the third century. Yes, Rome has a pyramid. Most people do not know this.