Nicholas Stanley-Price. A grave in a foreign land: early American presence at the Protestant burying-ground in Rome

Washington Irving in 1804 was the first of many American visitors to the Protestant cemetery in Rome who reflected on the tragedy of dying in a foreign land. The graves of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley provoked similar thoughts, as did the memorials to a growing number of Americans who died in the city.…

Thomas Jones’s excursion to the English Cemetery and Testaccio in Rome, 1777

On his visit to Testaccio on 22 March 1777, the Welsh artist Thomas Jones made a watercolour of the English cemetery at the foot of the Pyramid. This and two other views that he made, of Monte Testaccio and of the customs house (La Doganella), illustrate the areas topography and how visitors access to the…

Nicholas Stanley-Price. Memorial sculpture in the Protestant Cemetery at Rome. New discoveries and an inventory of identified works.

This is a new inventory of over 130 monuments in the Cemetery for which the sculptor, architect or bronze foundry, either Italian or non-Italian, has been identified. There are many new identifications, often based on inscriptions on the sculptures that have not previously been recognised. Among them are many works by known foreign sculptors who…

Nicholas Stanley-Price. The sacrosanct status of the graves of Keats and Shelley in the 20th century.

Formal decisions taken in the 1880s and 1890s confirmed that the graves of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley in Rome were considered to be sacrosanct. In the twentieth century, they continued to be depicted in art and literature, increasingly through photography and in fiction writing. Requests to be buried near the poets changed the…

Nicholas Stanley-Price. The Old Cemetery for foreigners in Rome with a new inventory of its burials.

A new inventory of over 150 burials made in the Old Cemetery, with notes on each individual, including Stuart courtiers and Grand Tourists but also more women and working people than previously identified. The article reconsiders evidence for how the Cemetery developed, how extensive it was, and when stone monuments were first erected.

Nicholas Stanley-Price. The grave of John Keats revisited.

The Keats-Shelley Review 33, 2 (2019), 175-193 Many visitors to John Keats’s grave in Rome in the nineteenth century thought it ‘neglected’ or ‘solitary’ and unshaded. Today’s critics, viewing it in a corner of the cemetery, sometimes describe it as ‘marginal’. An analysis of the history of the grave suggests that, on the contrary, it…

Nicholas Stanley-Price. Shelley’s grave re-visited

The Keats-Shelley Journal 65 (2016), 53-69 The grave in Rome of Percy Bysshe Shelley soon became a place of pilgrimage for admirers of his poetry, and remains one today. Evidence derived from cemetery records, early visitors’ accounts and depictions of the grave reveals how, during the 19th century, it acquired an aura of sanctity, an…

Nicholas Stanley-Price. Foreigners only! The cemetery for non-Catholics in Rome.

Foreigners who died in Rome fall into four broad categories, based on why they were in Italy. The article also comments on feelings of nostalgia for their homelands, and on the sculptors among the foreign population who designed gravestones for their friends.

Nicholas Stanley-Price. The myth of Catholic prejudice against Protestant funerals in eighteenth-century Rom

Online at http://www.acdan.it/analecta/analecta_42.htm The many eyewitness accounts of funerals, and the depictions of these events by artists, show that there prevailed an atmosphere of tolerance rather than prejudice by the Papal authorities towards the Protestants in Rome in the eighteenth century.

See Rome… and die. Legacies of the Grand Tour in a Roman cemetery.

An analysis of their tomb inscriptions, early travellers accounts and genealogical data suggests that at least fifteen of the graves in the Old Cemetery (Parte Antica) were of young men who died in Rome while on the Grand Tour.