Non-Catholic Cemetery and the Pyramid of Cestius

Historic · Testaccio / Ostiense (Via Caio Cestio, by Porta San Paolo)Rome,Italy

A walled cemetery for those Rome would not bury in a Catholic churchyard, under cypresses beside a Roman pyramid, with Keats and Shelley in it.

The Non-Catholic Cemetery is a walled green quiet on the edge of central Rome, with a Roman pyramid standing at its corner. About four thousand graves lie under cypresses and cut grass, and two of them draw most visitors. John Keats was buried here in February 1821 at twenty-five, under a stone that carries no name, only the line he asked for: here lies one whose name was writ in water. Shelley's ashes came the next year. The pyramid beside them is the tomb of Gaius Cestius, thirty-six metres of brick faced in white marble, built when Egyptian things were briefly the fashion in Rome. The cemetery exists because of who could not be buried in a Catholic churchyard: Protestants, Orthodox, Jews, atheists, and above all foreigners who died in Rome far from anyone who knew them. Cats sleep between the stones, the grass is kept short, and the old lawn at the far end is the quietest corner. The pyramid survived where almost every other Roman tomb here did not. Three centuries after it went up, the city wall was run straight through this spot, and the engineers built it into the wall rather than pull it down.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Take the free map at the gatehouse before you walk in — the older lawn and the terraced newer section are separate parts of the cemetery, and the famous graves are not near each other.
Come in the morning; this place closes early — the gate shuts well before dark and earlier still on Sundays, and the last entry is half an hour before closing.
Read the whole of Keats's stone, not just the famous line — the sentences above it were written by his friends in anger at his reviewers, and they change the way you read the epitaph.
Keep your voice down and stay off the grass around graves — this is a working cemetery with recent burials in it, and families visit while you are there.

Things to do

1
Find Keats in the far corner of the old lawn
Walk to the left-hand end of the open grass, away from the terraces. Two stones stand side by side under the wall: the poet John Keats and the painter Joseph Severn, who nursed him and outlived him by half a century. Read both inscriptions, then turn round — the pyramid stands directly behind you above the trees.
2
Follow the wall to the pyramid built into it
From outside the cemetery, walk along the line of the ancient city wall to where it meets the pyramid. The brickwork runs straight into the marble and stops. The tomb stood here first, and when the city wall was built the Romans made it part of their defences.
3
Walk the upper terraces slowly
The newer part climbs in terraces under cypresses, and the graves here stand much closer together than on the lawn below. Read the names as you go: they are Russian, German, American, Greek and Swedish. Look for the seated marble angel slumped forward over a tomb slab, carved in the 1890s by an American sculptor for his own wife.