It is the final resting place of the poet John Keats, whose nameless gravestone bears the epitaph: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ashes are also interred at the site, brought to Rome after the poet drowned in a storm while sailing his yacht off the Italian Riviera. His grave is inscribed: “Cor cordium” (“Heart of hearts”) with Shakespeare’s lines from The Tempest: “Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.”
The celebrated Protestant Cemetery in Rome, now officially known as the Non-Catholic Cemetery, has long been seen as the resting place for renegades in the citadel of the Catholic Church.
But research published today by The Times