Famous Long Ago

Not far from the Roman Metro station named “Piramide”, across Piazzale Ostiense, past the weedy marble flank of an enormous pyramidal structure, and left into Via Caio Cestio, you will find yourself walking along a rather featureless stone wall.  If you continue and are patient, though, you’ll find a large stone gate in the wall marked by a small marble plaque.  The plaque reads, in part:

Campo Cestio
L’antico Cimitero
per Stranieri Non Cattolici. 

It means that you have found the Field of Cestius, the old cemetery for non-Catholic foreigners.

Once inside the iron gate, the noise and chaos of modern Rome is silenced and stilled as if by magic. Perhaps you will hear a gentle sighing if there is a breeze swaying the tall cypresses, or the more ragged note of the occasional pine or palm tree.  There may be other visitors along the shaded pathways between slightly shaggy box hedges, but the slow crunch of their footsteps will soon hesitate and stop, for there is much to arrest the visitor’s attention:  a familiar name on a gravestone, perhaps, or a sentiment expressed in marble poetry.  There is no uniformity in the monuments except the dignifying imprimatur of time:  a stone angel weeps over a tomb, wings draped over the sides in sorrow, while atop another monument an angel of resurrection stands with wings spread in triumph. 

There are plain stones with simple inscriptions; there are statues, and elaborate scrollwork; there are marble basins that may hold flowers or moss or cats.  (Some of the myriad cats of Rome make themselves at home in the cemetery.  No doubt these cats are non-Catholic, as required by the property’s covenants, but probably not pagan. There is another colony of cats in the Roman ruins of Largo Argentina which would probably claim that distinction. There is a feline sanctuary near the cemetery, so the cats of Campo Cestio are mostly sleek and well-fed.)

If you go in spring or summer, flowers of many kinds will flourish on and between the graves –   primroses, daisies, roses – softening the stones, celebrating rebirth and the hopeful changing of seasons.  Even in winter, though, shrubs survive along the pathways.

Painters, sculptors, poets and others of a creative temperament have for centuries flocked to Rome, of course, stocking the city with stranieri – foreigners – through the ages.  But the problem of where to bury non-Catholics when they died didn’t become crucial until the age of the European Grand Tours undertaken by upper-class youths from Britain and Protestant northern Europe.  From the late 17th century and into the 19th, these visitors brought home stories of sunny, warm Italy and the glorious Roman monuments of antiquity.  Ever since, northern Europeans and Americans have sought the comforting warmth, both of weather and culture, and inspiration from the ancients. 

O for a beaker full of the warm south,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene …

Although he knew the Hippocrene was a well on Mount Helicon in Greece, whose waters provided poetic inspiration, in his hour of crisis the author of those lines came to Rome instead, as we shall see.  Many others came to stay and die there.  And since in Rome under the Papacy non-Catholics could not be buried in consecrated ground, a plot of church-owned land near the ancient town walls was designated as the last resting place for those not of the faith.  George Langton, a British aristocrat, was the first person known to have been buried there, in 1738.  Well … let me make a slight correction.  He was the first person known to have been buried in the plot of land designated by the Pope for non-Catholic foreigners.  But someone else was buried so closely nearby, and so memorably marked is his grave, that I must give him pride of place.  He too was not a Catholic, but he was no foreigner.    

During the reign of Caesar Augustus, in about 12 BC, a man named Gaius Cestius died in Rome.  Gaius was a magistrate and a Tribune of the Plebs.  Since burials were not allowed within the city in those times, his will specified that a mausoleum in the shape of a pyramid be constructed for him on a plot of land he owned outside the city boundary.  Gaius may have served in the Roman military and seen pyramids on campaigns in Nubia (present day Sudan).  The Nubian pyramids were steeper, narrower and younger than the ancient pyramids in Giza, but many of them were a few centuries old by the time Gaius Cestius encountered them. 

To ensure that his memory would last forever, his heir caused an inscription to be carved on the pyramid:  Gaius Cestius, son of Lucius, of the gens Pobilia, member of the College of Epulones, praetor, tribune of the plebs, septemvir of the Epulones.  Another inscription credits the heir and the builders for having completed the work in a lightning-fast 330 days.

No doubt visitors were suitably impressed for the next couple of centuries, during the Pax Romana, but Gaius’ monument suffered an ignominious transformation in the third century AD, when German barbarian tribes began to be a serious threat. Ominous events such as the Roman Army’s defeat by the invaders at the battle of Placentia caused the Emperor Aurelian to order a new defensive wall to be built around the city.  The government was running a bit of a deficit in those days, so to save money and time, a number of existing structures were incorporated into the new wall.  Gaius Cestius’ pyramid became a bastion, part of Rome’s defensive perimeter, and weeds began to grow between the slabs of marble on its flanks.

Part of Aurelian’s wall was destroyed in the sixth century AD during the struggle between the Ostrogoths and the Eastern Roman Empire of Justinian.  Both wanted control of the Italian peninsula.  In 546, with a temporary advantage over Justinian’s general Belisarius, the Ostrogoth leader Totila ordered the wall demolished.  This order was more easily announced than accomplished, and more than two-thirds of the walls survived. It marked the boundary of the city of Rome, right up until the 19th century.

However, as the centuries passed and the Western Roman Empire faded into history, the origins of the pyramid were forgotten.  Though the inscription remained, the medieval inhabitants of Rome called the pyramid meta remi, “tomb of Remus”, after the twin brother of Rome’s legendary founder, Romulus.  In fact, there was another pyramid near the Vatican which was known as the “tomb of Romulus”.  That monument, of unknown origin, was demolished in the 16th century and its marble sheathing probably put to use in church building.

Cestius’ pyramid survived, though, mainly because it was part of Aurelian’s wall.  It still is.  A section of the wall near the Porta Ostiensis intersects the pyramid, and also forms one side of the cemetery’s enclosure.  The pyramid was excavated in the late 17th century by order of Pope Alexander VII.  The weeds were stripped from the sides. The burial chamber was opened, and the workmen found frescoed decoration on the walls, but nothing else.  Sometime, presumably in antiquity, the tomb had been looted.  Even the frescoes are now faint and faded, and Gaius’ bones are probably long since dust.

The pyramid towers above the cemetery, exactly 100 roman feet high.  Even the cypresses are not so tall.  And yet it is the lives and stories marked by the smaller stones that touch our hearts most closely.  Cestius’ giant pyramid tells of a powerful and wealthy man, whose monument celebrates a successful life much admired by his fellows.  And, too, Cestius’ mausoleum does not completely share the peace and tranquility of the cemetery with the other graves, since the pyramid is exposed on one side to the clamor and chaos of modern Rome.

There are monuments to famous people here, to be sure, though for some the fame was fleeting.  An actress well-known in the 1950s, Belinda Lee, is one.  Gregory Corso, an American poet identified with the “beat” generation, but unexpectedly an admirer of Shelley, is buried near his hero, as he wished.  August von Goethe has a headstone placed by his father, the great German poet and playwright Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, that is marked simply “Goethe filius”.  Antonio Gramschi, founder of the Italian Communist Party, rests here. There are memorials to painters, sculptors, scientists and poets who were personages of note in their times but who are now remembered chiefly by scholars of their fields.

There is the grave of Rosa Bathurst with a long inscription mourning her death, expressing the grief of her mother both for Rosa’s passing but, curiously, also the mysterious disappearance of Rosa’s father “on a mission to Vienna”.  Benjamin Bathurst was lost at the age of 26.  Rosa, who was widely admired by the British contingent in Rome for her beauty and charm, was thrown from her horse into the Tiber River and drowned.  Stendhal wrote of her death in his diary.  She was 16 years old. “If thou art young and lovely, build not thereon”, the inscription warns.

There are others here whose fame was more enduring.  Percy Bysshe Shelley is buried here.  So is his three-year-old son William.  Shelley and his wife Mary Wollstonecraft knew the place too well, but, like many others, seemed to find solace in its peace and beauty.  In the preface to his Adonais, the great elegy written to honor John Keats, Shelley recounted that he visited the younger poet’s grave “… in the lonely and romantic cemetery of the Protestants in that city, and under the pyramid which is the tomb of Cestius … It might make one in love with death to think that one might be buried in so sweet a place.” 

The ironic prescience of these words is startling.  Little more than a year after he began writing Adonais, Shelley, sailing his own craft from Livorno to Lerici, was caught in a sudden storm and drowned when his boat capsized.  He was cremated on the beach at Viareggio by his friends, including Byron and the adventurer Edward John Trelawney.  According to tradition, Trelawney snatched his heart from the flames and gave it to Mary Shelley, and after her death it was found among her possessions, wrapped in a page from Adonais.  Shelley’s ashes, however, were eventually buried in the Protestant Cemetery, his gravestone bearing a quotation from The Tempest: 

Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

Beauty, love, fame, death and poetry – these were the preoccupations of perhaps the most famous person to be buried within the cemetery walls.  John Keats, the poet who yearned for the true and blushful Hippocrene, did indeed come to Rome seeking something as precious as inspiration – his health.  He was a victim of tuberculosis, a disease which took his mother when he was 14 years old, and eventually all three of his brothers.  Keats had nursed his brother Tom Keats during the last months of Tom’s life, and possibly contracted the disease while doing so.  He came to Rome with a faithful friend, Joseph Severn, a painter of considerable skill.  He left behind in England a literary career that had early suffered ferocious condemnation but that also had influential supporters, and which would, after his death, make him one of the most loved poets in the English language.  His great odes – On a Grecian Urn, On Indolence, On Melancholy, To a Nightingale, To Psyche, and To Autumn, along with The Eve of St. Agnes and La Belle Dame Sans Merci, are among the most memorable works of British romantic poetry.

He also left behind in England his fiancée Fanny Brawne, a young woman with whom he had a passionate and troubled romance.  Their relationship was probably complicated by Keats’ knowledge, according to his friend Charles Armitage Brown, that he was fated to die young.  Keats wrote in 1818:

When I have fears that I may cease to be
Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain …

The sonnet continues as he laments the work he knows he will never complete.  Then, at last, the subject becomes love:

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour,
That I shall never look upon thee more …
then on the shore
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think
Till Love and Fame to nothingness do sink.

John Keats died in February 1821, aged 25, in an apartment overlooking the Spanish steps.  Though love and fame may have been nothingness, he evidently felt anguish for the unrealized poetry of which he knew he was capable, and for the recognition he knew he deserved.  He couldn’t have known that his words would still touch people’s hearts two hundred years later.  He told Severn that his gravestone should contain only these words:

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

Though Severn, who was buried next to Keats many years later, could not resist including a few words of explanation, nonetheless John Keats rests under an epitaph for someone unnamed.  But he is not forgotten.

The great Gaius Cestius was forgotten for more than a thousand years, until a 17th century Pope excavated his tomb.  When, in time, the small stone above Keats’ grave falls and its inscription is eroded away by the rain, nothing will be lost.  But will a poet’s name, written in water, survive two thousand years?  Shakespeare was confident in his own poetry, and perhaps he can speak for another poet as well:

Not marble, nor the gilded monuments
Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme.

Text © 2013 by Joe Gartman; Photographs © 2013 by Patricia Gartman. First published in Italia! Guide to Rome and the South, Spring 2013