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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. Sixteen American Protestants were buried there in the period 1800–49. Memorials for Americans were designed by prominent sculptors such as E.G. Göthe, Henry Kirke Brown, and – a recent discovery – Thomas Crawford, commissioned by a South Carolina client. Struck by the pathos of seeing their compatriots’ graves, American travellers in their memoirs nevertheless concurred with Shelley that the beauty of the Protestant cemetery provided ample solace for the tragedy of dying abroad.

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 Recinto di Testaccio was controlled. Earlier that month, on a visit north of the city, he made one of the few known drawings of the burial-ground at the Muro Torto, where heretics were buried before the Protestant Cemetery came into being.

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 had settled in Rome. There are elaborate monuments that were evidently commissioned by wealthy relatives or friends of the deceased; but a greater number of sculptures were contributed by artistic family members or by other fellow artists, as a tribute to the deceased.

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 environment of Shelley’s grave while Keats’s grave was at risk when the Cemetery was bombed during WW2, leading to criticism in the press of its condition. Regular commemoration ceremonies remind us of the continuing sanctity of the poets graves today.