Literary Rome: Strangers in Paradise

Fall has arrived and there's no better time to be in Rome! The air is cool and silky; moderate temperatues make being outdoors a pleasure. These sunny autumn days are called ottobrate romane and since antiquity they have been celebrated for their extraordinary light and their crisp, clear air.

The crisp air and the golden light of Rome in the fall and the winter have inspired many writers to wax eloquently upon the beauty of the Eternal City. Visiting Rome in the nineteenth century, the American writer Henry James extolled the extraordinary quality of Rome's atmosphere:

The aesthetic is so intense that you feel you should live on the taste of it, should extract the nutritive essence of the atmosphere. For positively it's such an atmosphere! The weather is perfect, the sky as blue as the most exploded tradition fames it, the whole air glowing and throbbing with lovely color....

James was just one of many American and British writers who found their muse in Rome. We'll be talking about those Strangers in Paradise in this issue of City News as we pay a visit to literary Rome and the achievements it has inspired.

Writing Rome: The Romance of Ruins

For centuries travelers have been coming to the Eternal City to admire its layers of history, to revel in the romance of its ruins, and to soothe their souls as they traverse the layers of time.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, British and American writers were among the tourists who flooded Rome. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Oscar Wilde, and many others sought to convey the experience of Rome in travel journals, poetry, and fiction.

The British Romantic Poet, Lord Byron, started a fad in the early nineteenth century when he described a nocturnal foray into the Colosseum. In his poem, Manfred, Byron penned a celebrated description of the Roman arena as seen under a brightly-lit moon. From this point on, nighttime visits to the Colosseum became de rigeur for nineteenth-century travelers, many of whom had committed Byron’s lines to memory:

When I was wandering, - upon such a night
I stood within the Coliseum's wall,
Midst the chief relics of almighty Rome!
The trees which grew along the broken arches
Waved dark in the blue midnight, and the stars
Shone through the rents of ruin; from afar
The watchdog bay'd beyond the Tiber; and
More near from out the Caesars' palace came
The owl's long cry...
Ivy usurps the laurel's place of growth;-
But the gladiators' bloody Circus stands,
A noble wreck in ruinous perfection!

Byron’s praise for the Colosseum became part of the myth of Rome. The experience of visiting the arena at night was repeatedly incorporated into Rome’s literary tradition. Most famous of late night visitors to the Colosseum is probably Daisy Miller, a character penned by Henry James in his story of the same name.

A spunky and impetuous American girl who refused to conform to European social conventions or to listen to practical advice, Daisy risked all to experience the romance and mystique of the Colosseum at night. Her midnight rendezvous with the colossal ruin cost her life, for in the arena she contracted Roman Fever. She died shortly thereafter and James laid his fictional character to rest in Rome's idyllic Non-Catholic Cemetery.

Read Daisy Miller! Buy a copy from the iDC City Bookshop!

The Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome: An Endangered Monument

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 Non-Catholic Cemetery (often called the Protestant Cemetery).

The cemetery got its start in the early eighteenth century when this area of town was little more than a cow field. The cemetery was established to accommodate the graves of non-Catholic travelers and residents who died in Rome, for Papal law forbade their burial in Catholic resting places.

The earliest grave discovered in the Protestant cemetery dates to 1738, an era in which Roman law required that funeral services be held after dark and by torch light. Since the early eighteenth century, approximately 4000 people have been buried in this green idyll, and today, the cemetery is one of the most peaceful and beautiful places in all of Rome.

A cemetery is a must-see for any lover of literature. In the oldest section of the cemetery is the grave of the English Romantic poet, John Keats (1796-1821). Having contracted tuberculosis, Keats came to Rome in search of a healing climate. He took up residence in a pensione overlooking the Spanish Steps, but the disease took his life just three months after his arrival.

After Keats' death, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelly visited his grave in the Protestant Cemetery 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 body was cremated on the beach, but his ashes were interred in this cemetery and his grave was inscribed cor cordium or "heart of hearts."

From the early nineteenth century to the present day, the graves of Keats and Shelley have been sites of literary pilgrimage. Oscar Wilde sought to pay homage to these Romantic poets when he visited the cemetery in 1877, immediately after an audience with Pope Pius IX. Upon seeing the grave of Keats, Wilde fell to the ground and lay prone atop the plot for a long while. When he rose to his feet he declared, "this is the holiest site in Rome".

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 is on the World Monument Fund's 2006 list of the 100 most endangered sites on earth. Many of the cemetery's monuments 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.

To help preserve the cemetery, a new organization, Friends of the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome, has been founded. We at the Institute of Design & Culture have joined this effort and we invite you to do the same. If you'd like to help, visit their website:

Make a Contribution to the Protestant Cemetery

In the English Ghetto: the Keats-Shelley Memorial House

In the era of the Grand Tour, the neighborhood around the Spanish Steps was known as the English Ghetto. There, English-speaking travelers and expatriates made their homes. Among them was the poet John Keats, who came to Rome in late 1820 and died just a few months later in February of 1821.

The Roman pensione in which Keats spent the last three months of his life overlooks the Spanish Steps. Though this is now a rather tony address, Keats' accommodations were quite modest, for he was neither wealthy nor well-known at the time of his death. He occupied a few small rooms, including a bedroom that looked out at the Spanish Steps and a living room that faced Piazza di Spagna. As there were not kitchen facilities, meals were brought in by local restaurants.

Though Keats' possessions and furniture were burned after his death in 1821 (Roman law required this following death by a disease like tuberculosis), the building that housed Keats' rooms was purchased and restored in the early twentieth century. It now houses a museum and one of the finest libraries of Romantic literature in the world.

On view in the museum is an extensive collection of paintings, objects and manuscripts celebrating the lives of Keats, Shelley and Byron, as well as locks of Milton and Elizabeth Barrett's hair, a manuscript and poem by Oscar Wilde, and splendidly bound first editions and letters by Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Joseph Severn, Charles and Mary Cowden-Clarke.

You can learn more about the Keats-Shelley House by visiting their website, where you can take a virtual tour, or by planning a visit next time you're in Rome.

The Keats-Shelley Memorial House

"It was on a dreary night of November..."

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, writer and wife of Percy Bysshe Shelley, is not buried in Rome, nor did she write a novel that used the city as its backdrop. Nonetheless Mary Shelley traveled several times to the Eterna. Like so many other literary visitors of her era, she found Rome to be spellbinding. Most of her time in the city was taken up with visiting museums, archaeological sites, and churches, and a letter of 1819 describes her experience:

But my letter would never be at an end if I were to try [to] tell a millionth part of the delights of Rome - it has such an effect on me that my past life before I saw it appears a blank and now I begin to live - in the churches you hear the music of heaven and the singing of angels.

Mary Shelley is best known for her novel Frankenstein; or,The Modern Prometheus, and though it speaks of a world outside Rome, we take a moment this Halloween to pay homage to her literary masterpiece.

Born in London on 30 August 1797, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin was the second daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, an early feminist writer, and of William Godwin, an anarchist, atheist, and dissenter. Mary lived up to her the achievements of her intellectual parents, publishing Frankenstein; or,The Modern Prometheus at a young age. How did this book come into being?

When Mary was sixteen years old, she met her husband-to-be, Percy Shelley, when he and his wife visited her family's bookshop and home. Over the course of the summer of 1814, they fell in love and eloped to France - despite the fact that Shelley was still married. They were soon forced to return to Britain for lack of financial resources.

In 1816, Mary and Percy returned to the continent, taking up residence in Lake Geneva for the summer. Lord Byron was living nearby, and one evening at a gathering of writers and intellectuals, Byron proposed a competition amongst the writers: each would compose a ghost story and share it with the others.

By the next morning, Mary had come up with nothing. However, the following night she had a waking dream in which she saw "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together." After talking about this dream with Byron, Mary began to write what was to become the fourth chapter of Frankenstein, which begins, "It was on a dreary night of November...."

The story is one of a young Swiss student, Victor Frankenstein, who discovers the secret of animating lifeless matter. By assembling body parts, Frankenstein creates a monster who vows revenge on his creator after being rejected from society.
Today we often identify the artificially-created being in this story as "Frankenstein," but it is interesting to note that it is the creator, and not the creature, that bears this name in Shelley's novel.

Shelley's Frankenstein was published in 1818 and critics immediately began to debate its meaning. It has been read as an allegory of the Industrial Revolution and the ultimate power found in the creation of life. Others have seen it as a tale of pregnancy and motherhood, reflecting the fears of bringing a new innocent life into the world and raising it properly so that it does not become a monster.

Buy Frankenstein from the iDC City Bookshop

Want to Learn More About Literary Rome?

If you're interested in learning more about literary Rome, visit the iDC City Bookshop, which features a selection of books about Rome and about those who have written about it.

Or, take our Strangers in Paradise City Course when you're next in Rome. We'll donate 10% of the proceeds from the City Course to the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome.

The iDC City Bookshop