This article needs additional citations for verification .(February 2015) |
Non-Catholic Cemetery Protestant Cemetery | |
---|---|
Cimitero acattolico | |
Details | |
Established | 1716 |
Location | |
Country | Italy |
Coordinates | 41°52′35″N12°28′48″E / 41.8764°N 12.4799°E |
Type | Public |
Style | 18th–19th-century European |
Website | Official website |
Find a Grave | Non-Catholic Cemetery Protestant Cemetery |
The Non-Catholic Cemetery (Italian : Cimitero Acattolico), also referred to as the Protestant Cemetery (Italian : Cimitero dei protestanti) or the English Cemetery (Italian : Cimitero degli Inglesi), is a private cemetery in the rione of Testaccio in Rome. It is near Porta San Paolo and adjacent to the Pyramid of Cestius, a small-scale Egyptian-style pyramid built between 18 and 12 BCE as a tomb and later incorporated into the section of the Aurelian Walls that borders the cemetery. It has Mediterranean cypress, pomegranate and other trees, and a grassy meadow. It is the final resting place of non-Catholics including but not exclusive to Protestants or British people. The earliest known burial is that of a Dr Arthur, a Protestant medical doctor hailing from Edinburgh, in 1716. [1] The English poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, as well as Russian painter Karl Briullov and Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci are buried there.
Since the norms of the Catholic Church forbade burying on consecrated ground non-Catholics – including Protestants, Jews and Orthodox – as well as suicides (these, after death, were "expelled" by the Christian community and buried outside the walls or at the extreme edge of the same). Burials occurred at night to avoid manifestations of religious fanaticism and to preserve the safety of those who participated in the funeral rites. An exception was made for Sir Walter Synnot, who managed to bury his daughter in broad daylight in 1821; he was accompanied by a group of guards to be protected from incursions of fanatics. [2]
In the 18th and 19th centuries, the area of the non-Catholic cemetery was called "The meadows of the Roman people". It was an area of public property, where drovers used to graze the cattle, wine was kept in the cavities created in the so-called Monte dei Cocci, an artificial hill where the Romans went to have fun. [2] The area was dominated by the Pyramid of Caius Cestius which for centuries was one of the most visited monuments of the city. It was the non-Catholics themselves who chose those places for their burials, and they were allowed by a decision of the Holy Office, which in 1671 consented that the "non-Catholic Messers" who died in the city were spared a burial in the shameful cemetery of Muro Torto. The first burial of a Protestant was that of a follower of the exiled King James VII and II, named William Arthur, who died in Rome where he had come to escape the repressions following the defeats of the Jacobites in Scotland. Other burials followed, which did not concern only courtiers of King James II, who in the meanwhile had settled in Rome. It is said that in 1732 the treasurer of the King of England, William Ellis, was buried at the foot of the Pyramid. By that time the area had acquired the status of a cemetery of the British, although the people buried there were not only from the United Kingdom. [3]
The cemetery developed without any official recognition and only at the end of 1700 Papal authorities started to take care of it. It was not until the 1820s that the Papal government appointed a custodian to oversee the area and the cemetery functions. The public disinterest was mainly determined by the fact that in the current mentality, where the only burial conceived by the Catholics were the ones happening in a church, the availability of a cemetery that provided non-Catholic burials was not considered a privilege. [4]
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, only holly plants grew in the area, and there was no other natural nor artificial protection for the tombs scattered in the countryside, where cattle were grazing, as the cypresses that adorn the cemetery today were planted later on. In 1824 a moat was erected that surrounded the ancient part of the cemetery. In ancient times crosses or inscriptions were forbidden, as in all non-Catholic cemeteries, at least until 1870. [2]
For a long time, there have been common graves divided by nations: Germany, Greece, Sweden and Romania. [2]
As of 2011, the custody and management of the cemetery was entrusted to foreign representatives in Italy.
The great, hundred-year-old cypresses, the green meadow that surrounds part of the tombs, the white pyramid that stands behind the enclosure of Roman walls, together with the cats that walk undisturbed among the tombstones written in all the languages of the world, give to this small cemetery a peculiar aura. As in use in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, there are no photographs on the tombstones.
The Non-Catholic Cemetery of Rome is intended for the rest of all non-Catholics, without any distinction of nationality. Because of the scarcity of space, relatively few illustrious Italians are buried there, on the grounds of having expressed in life alternative culture and ideas ("foreign" compared to the dominant one), for the quality of their work, or for any other circumstances for which they were somehow deemed "foreign" in their own country. Among them, the politicians Antonio Gramsci and Emilio Lussu alongside Giorgio Napolitano, the writer and poet Dario Bellezza, the writers Carlo Emilio Gadda and Luce d'Eramo and a few others. It is rare that new burials are added. On 18 July 2019, the writer Andrea Camilleri was buried here. In 2023, former President of Italy Giorgio Napolitano was buried here.
Nicholas Stanley-Price has published an Inventory of early burials at the Non-Catholic Cemetery. [5]
Keats died in Rome of tuberculosis at the age of 25, and is buried in the cemetery. His epitaph, which does not mention him by name, is by his friends Joseph Severn and Charles Armitage Brown, and reads:
This grave contains all that was mortal, of a young English poet, who on his death bed, in the bitterness of his heart, at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be engraven on his tombstone: Here lies one whose name was writ in water.
Shelley drowned in 1822 in a sailing accident off the Italian Riviera. When his body washed up upon the shore, a copy of Keats's poetry borrowed from Leigh Hunt was discovered in his pocket, doubled back, as though it had been put away in a hurry. He was cremated on the beach near Viareggio by his friends, the poet Lord Byron and the English adventurer Edward John Trelawny. His ashes were sent to the British consulate in Rome, who had them interred in the Protestant Cemetery some months later.
Shelley's heart supposedly survived cremation and was snatched out of the flames by Trelawny, who subsequently gave it to Shelley's widow, Mary. When Mary Shelley died, the heart was found in her desk wrapped in the manuscript of "Adonais", the elegy Shelley had written the year before upon the death of Keats, in which the poet urges the traveller, "Go thou to Rome ...".
Shelley and Mary's three-year-old son William was also buried in the Protestant Cemetery.
Shelley's heart [6] was finally buried, encased in silver, in 1889, with the son who survived him, Sir Percy Florence Shelley, [7] but his gravestone in the Protestant Cemetery is inscribed: Cor cordium ("heart of hearts"), followed by a quotation from Shakespeare's The Tempest :
Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change,
Into something rich and strange.
Joseph Severn was an English portrait and subject painter and a personal friend of the English poet John Keats. He exhibited portraits, Italian genre, literary and biblical subjects, and a selection of his paintings can today be found in some of the most important museums in London, including the National Portrait Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum and Tate Britain.
The Vienna Central Cemetery is one of the largest cemeteries in the world by number of interred, and is the most well-known cemetery among Vienna's nearly 50 cemeteries. The cemetery's name is descriptive of its significance as Vienna's biggest cemetery, not of its geographic location, as it is not in the city center of the Austrian capital, but on the southern outskirts, in the outer city district of Simmering.
The pyramid of Cestius is an ancient Roman pyramid in Rome, Italy, near the Porta San Paolo and the Protestant Cemetery. It was built in the style of the Nubian pyramids as a tomb for Gaius Cestius, a member of the Epulones religious corporation. It stands at a fork between two ancient roads, the Via Ostiensis and another road that ran west to the Tiber along the approximate line of the modern Via Marmorata. Due to its incorporation into the city's fortifications, it is today one of the best-preserved ancient buildings in Rome.
The Campo Verano is a cemetery in Rome, Italy, founded in the early 19th century. The monumental cemetery covers a surface area of 83 hectares which is currently divided into several sections: the main Catholic cemetery, the Jewish cemetery established in 1895, a Protestant section with its own entrance and a military section with monument to the victims of World War I.
Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. is a pastoral elegy written by Percy Bysshe Shelley for John Keats in 1821, and widely regarded as one of Shelley's best and best-known works. The poem, which is in 495 lines in 55 Spenserian stanzas, was composed in the spring of 1821 immediately after 11 April, when Shelley heard of Keats's death. It is a pastoral elegy, in the English tradition of John Milton's Lycidas. Shelley had studied and translated classical elegies. The title of the poem is modelled on ancient works, such as Achilleis, an epic poem by the 1st-century AD Roman poet Statius, and refers to the untimely death of the Greek Adonis, a god of fertility. Some critics suggest that Shelley used Virgil's tenth Eclogue, in praise of Cornelius Gallus, as a model.
The English Cemetery in Florence, Italy is an Evangelical cemetery located at Piazzale Donatello. Although its origins date to its foundation in 1827 by the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church, the name "English Cemetery" results from the majority of its burials being Protestants from the British and American communities of Florence, and who gave the largest sum of money for the purchase of its land. The cemetery also holds the bodies of non-English speaking expatriates who died in Florence, among them Swiss and Scandinavians, as well as Eastern Orthodox Christians, among them Russians and Greeks. The cemetery is still owned by the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church, and is open for the interment of cremated ashes, now of all Christian denominations, but no longer for burials.
Hendrik Christian Andersen was a Norwegian-American sculptor, painter and urban planner.
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature.
The Cimitero monumentale di Staglieno is an extensive monumental cemetery located on a hillside in the district of Staglieno of Genoa, Italy, famous for its monumental sculpture. Covering an area of more than a square kilometre, it is one of the largest cemeteries in Europe.
The English Cemetery, Il Cimitero degli Inglesi, or more correctly, Il Cimitero acattolico di Santa Maria delle Fede, is located near Piazza Garibaldi, Naples, Italy. It was the final resting place of many Swiss, Germans, Americans, Irish, Scottish and English who lived in Naples, were passing through on the Grand Tour, or were merchants or seamen.
The Keats–Shelley Memorial House is a writer's house museum in Rome, Italy, commemorating the Romantic poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. The museum houses one of the world's most extensive collections of memorabilia, letters, manuscripts, and paintings relating to Keats and Shelley, as well as Byron, Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Oscar Wilde, and others. It is located on the second floor of the building situated just to the south of the base of the Spanish Steps and east of the Piazza di Spagna.
The Old English Cemetery is a cemetery in Livorno (Leghorn), central Italy, located on a plot of land near the Via Verdi, close to the Waldensian Church and to the formerly Anglican church of St. George. It is the oldest Protestant cemetery in Italy.
TheCimitero Evangelicoagli Allori is located in Florence, Italy, between 'Due Strade' and Galluzzo.
Cimitero acattolico di Capri is a non-Catholic cemetery on the island of Capri. Established in 1878 by Englishman George Hayward, it contains 204 graves from a total of 21 different nations. Most of the people buried in the cemetery though are of English nationality, German, Russian or American. Aside from Protestants, also buried in the cemetery are Jews, Orthodox Christians and some Catholics. Notable interments include French Baron Jacques d'Adelsward-Fersen, Lucio Amelio, Günter Ammon, Gracie Fields, Norman Douglas and Jakob Johann von Uexküll.
Henriette Hertz was a German-born philanthropist and art collector. She donated the Palazzo Zuccari to house the Bibliotheca Hertziana in 1912.
William Henry Herriman was an expatriate American art collector in Rome who, on his death, left important works of art to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Brooklyn Museum.
Harald Adolf Nikolaj Jerichau was a Danish landscape painter.
The San Michele Cemetery has been Venice’s principal cemetery since its creation in 1807. The cemetery is located on the island of Isola di San Michele between Venice and Murano. In addition to the main consecrated Catholic burial ground, there are separate Protestant and Eastern Orthodox sections catering to non-Catholics. The Jewish cemetery of Venice, however, is located on the island of Lido. Both the cemetery and the island are named after the church of San Michele in Isola built in the 15th century on the island, dedicated to Saint Michael the Archangel.
The Stahnsdorf South-Western Cemetery is a Protestant rural cemetery in Germany. Established in 1909, the cemetery is located in the municipality of Stahnsdorf in Potsdam-Mittelmark district, Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region. With a land area of approximately 206 ha, it is the largest church-owned Christian cemetery in Germany, as well as being the tenth largest cemetery in the world and Germany's second largest cemetery after Hamburg's Ohlsdorf Cemetery. The cemetery is operated by the administration of the Berlin City Protestant Synod Association. Due to its status as one of the most important landscape parks in the Berlin metropolitan area, along with the large amount of historically valuable tombs and other buildings which include the landmark wooden chapel, the cemetery was designated as a place of special importance and a protected area by the state of Brandenburg in 1982.
The Old Catholic Cemetery consecrated in 1720, is one of the oldest cemeteries in Dresden, Saxony. It was the first Catholic burial ground established in the town after the Reformation. It is located in the Friedrichstadt district, on the left bank of the Elbe. Due to the vast number of baroque, rococo and neoclassical tombs and monuments, the designated historic landmark is one of the most culturally and historically important cemeteries in the Dresden region.
{{cite book}}
: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)