Weed & Read at Rome's Protestant Cemetery

Tucked beside an ancient gate and within a bend in Rome's third-century Aurelian Walls are two landmarks: one is the pyramid-shaped Roman tomb of a first-century civic magistrate named Gaius Cestius; the other is Rome's Protestant Cemetery.

This celebrated burial ground, which got its start in the eighteenth century, was established to accommodate the graves of non-Catholic travelers and residents who died in Rome. (Papal law forbade their burial in Catholic resting places.) Since then approximately 4000 people have been buried in this green oasis, and today, the Cemetery is celebrated as one of the most peaceful and beautiful places in all of Rome.

In the oldest section of the Cemetery is the grave of the English Romantic poet, John Keats, who died of tuberculosis in 1821, just three months after he came to Rome in search of a climate that might heal his disease. After Keats' death, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelly visited his grave and wrote that "it would make one in love with death to be buried in so beautiful a place." When Shelley himself died in a boating accident near Viareggio in 1822, his ashes were interred in this Cemetery and his grave was inscribed with the words cor cordium or "heart of hearts."

Visitors to the Protestant Cemetery agree that it is one of Rome's most extraordinary sites. But, at present, the Cemetery is at risk. It was on the World Monument Fund's 2005 list of the 100 most endangered sites on earth. Many of the cemetery's tombstones are crumbling - they've been damaged by pollution and by years without maintenance. The landscape is overgrown, and the site is waterlogged by poor drainage.

Alarmed by these threats to the Cemetery, UD offers its assistance each semester by organizing a project called "Weed & Read" in conjunction with the Association of American College & University Programs in Rome.

Thus, on Friday 4 April, Dr. Laura Flusche and Ryan Reedy, Rome Coordinator led some 45 volunteers from four Rome programs as they donned gloves and grabbed rakes and brooms. They went to work weeding and raking the cemetery and aiding its stone conservator in the cleaning of tombstones. In total they gave some 90 hours of labor and also enjoyed a literary tour of the Cemetery and an introduction to the works of Keats & Shelley. The event was an enormous success, so much so that one UD student remarked, "I'm happy to give something back to Rome."

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