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.