NOTES FROM ITALY: CIMITERO ACATTOLICO
by Peter Bridges
California Literary Review, CA
y-cimitero-acattolico/
Aug 15 2007
They came to Rome in the hundreds and even thousands, Americans,
English, Danes, Russians, Germans, Swedes, the educated and
sophisticated of so many nations. In the old days they came by carriage
and on horseback, but the roads were not safe. In 1645 the diarist
John Evelyn wrote that when his party left Rome "we were fain to
hire a strong convoy of about thirty firelocks, to guard us through
the cork-woods (much infested with the banditti)." The dangers did
not deter stout travelers. John Aubrey wrote how in the early 1600s
a young English nobleman, Charles Cavendish, went on from Italy to
Greece "and that would not serve his turne but he would go to Babylon."
There is however something to be said for traveling in comfort. Many
more foreign travelers began to visit Rome when it was finally linked
by rail with northern Europe, after the troops of Vittorio Emanuele II
put an end to the Papal state in 1870 and Rome became the capital of
reunited Italy. After 1870, too, the city began to grow. Big apartment
buildings and busy avenues replaced zones of quiet vineyards.
Though modernity had arrived there was still a season in which one
visited Rome, and that season was decidedly not summer. In summer
the days were hot and there was a miasma, a mal aria, that sickened
and killed many people, both visitors and residents. It had been
so for centuries. In the floor of the church of Santa Prassede is
the tombstone of a certain Peter, who died on a visit in Rome in
1400. He is shown as a youngish man, wearing a pilgrim’s cockleshell
and holding a pilgrim’s staff. I have always suspected that my namesake
died of fever-of malaria. Certainly Henry James’s heroine Daisy Miller
did so in the 1870s; she got "Roman fever" after going-foolishly,
said the author-to see the Colosseum by moonlight.
(It was indeed foolish; but people still did not know that it was
the mosquito that spread the fever.)
If the foreigners who died in old Papal Rome were not Catholic, they
could not be buried in a cemetery; cemeteries were for Catholics
alone. (The Jews, however, had a burial ground in Trastevere and
then, after 1645, on the Aventine hill where the city’s rose garden
now stands.) In the 1600s and even later, one sometimes saw a coach
leaving the city in the evening, to drive out into the empty campagna,
to bury some poor Protestant body.
In a painting by Johann Tischbein we see great Johann Wolfgang Goethe
lazing in the campagna for a few minutes, as painter and poet were
making their way to Naples in 1787. It was a pretty place to lie, not
just briefly but forever, where only sheep and a shepherd sometimes
came by and the green Apennines rose in the distance. But one had
to be buried there deep and without trace, given the wolves and the
grave robbers.
Eventually, in the eighteenth century, the Papal authorities relented
a little on non-Catholic burials. The authorities decided that they
would not object to such burials if they took place at a certain quiet
place at the southern edge of Rome, a city now much reduced in size
from what it had been in the age of the Emperors. There was a gate
there in the great city wall built by Aurelian in the third century
after Christ. The gate was for the ancient Via Ostiense. Paul had
probably walked out this road, before the wall was built, on his way
to execution on the orders of Nero. By the gate there was, and still
is, a white marble Pyramid a hundred feet high, the tomb of a rich
praetor named Gaius Cestius who died in 12 B.C. Surely Paul gazed at
this pyramid as he walked to martyrdom.
Nearby, and near the Tiber, stood that strangest of Roman hills,
the Testaccio-a mound a hundred feet high, composed of many thousand
broken amphoras that in ancient times had contained grain, wine,
and oil shipped up the Tiber to the city. In later centuries cool
wine-cellars were dug into the side of the Testaccio, and in the
1700s lower-class Romans went there to drink and make merry. It was
not a good part of town. (Today there are nightclubs in the hillside.)
In 1738 came the first burial by the Pyramid that we know of,
that of a young Oxford graduate named Langton. After him a number
of other non-Catholic foreigners were buried there, and not just
English people; there is a record of a student from Hannover being
buried there a few years later. But while the Papal authorities now
tolerated the non-Catholic burials, they had to take place at night,
probably to lessen the possibility that the local folk would mock if
not attack the foreigners’ funeral processions. (As late as 1854 a
small mob tried to assault a Protestant clergyman who had officiated
at the funeral of the wife of a German diplomat.)
In 1786 Goethe visited the burying-ground. The Papal authorities had
still not permitted it to be fenced off and protected, but it was a
green and peaceful place and the poet thought perhaps he might one
day end here:
May Mercury lead me hereafter, Past the Cestian monument, gently Down
to Hades.
As it turned out, Goethe’s only son, August, was buried here in 1830.
Goethe himself died in Weimar two years later and was buried there.
Grave of John Keats [Photo by Jimmy Renzi]
In November 1820 the young English poet John Keats came to Rome,
a sick man, and moved into an apartment by the Spanish Steps. Two
years earlier, at twenty-three, he had hiked over six hundred miles
in Scotland and climbed Ben Nevis-but that year, too, he had begun a
sonnet with "fears that I may cease to be/Before my pen has glean’d
my teeming brain." There was tuberculosis in the family; it had killed
his mother when he was fourteen, and later his brother Tom.
Within a month of his arrival in Rome it was clear that Keats was
dying. He sent his friend Joseph Severn to visit the little cemetery
beneath the pyramid of Caius Cestius. Severn recalled that when he came
back to Keats, "He expressed pleasure at my description…the grass
and the many flowers, particularly the innumerable violets-also about
a flock of goats and sheep and a young shepherd-all these intensely
interested him. Violets were his favourite flowers, and he joyed to
hear how they overspread the graves. He assured me that he seemed
already to feel the flowers growing over him." Soon enough they did;
and they grow there today.
England lost another fine poet when Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned off
the coast of Italy in 1822, when his schooner foundered. The following
year his ashes were interred near Keats’s grave.
Grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley [Photo by Jimmy Renzi]
For decades the Papal authorities would not permit construction of a
wall to protect the cemetery, where there were an increasing number
of fine marble stones and tombs. Nor could the tombs use the symbol
of the Cross, or bear inscriptions like "God is love," since extra
ecclesiam nulla salus-outside the (Catholic) church no salvation.
Eventually, after the end of the Papal state in 1870, a wall was built
and crosses permitted. To oversee the cemetery a committee of foreign
ambassadors was formed, in which the German envoy usually presided.
As the number of American visitors to Rome increased, so did the
American presence in the cemetery. Richard Henry Dana, Jr., who had
left Harvard in 1834 to go to sea, and later wrote Two Years Before the
Mast, died in Rome in 1882 (of influenza, not malaria) and was buried
there. The same year saw the death and burial of George Perkins Marsh,
who had written the first great American work on the environment,
Man and Nature, during his record 21-year term as the American envoy
to Italy. Henry James’ friend, the famous American sculptor William
Wetmore Story, died in Rome in 1895; he and his wife lie in the
cemetery beneath his marble "Angel of Grief."
Eventually it was decided to end burials in the older part of the
cemetery, the parte antica. In 1898 the Germans gave the cemetery a
simple but gracious funeral chapel. Other nations, too, began to bury
their dead at what became known officially as the Cimitero Acattolico
or non-Catholic cemetery. The Americans and English usually called it
the Protestant cemetery, but there were Armenian Christians there, and
many Orthodox, most notably the Russians. Walking past the Russian
tombs one sees the names of famous pre-Revolutionary families,
including a Yusupov-the father of the man who in 1916 killed that
insidious gray eminence, Rasputin, in St. Petersburg.
(Curiously, there is a fine marble tomb of a Soviet soldier said to
have been killed while fighting alongside Italian partisans in World
War II. Who paid for his tomb?)
Few Italians are buried in the cemetery. One is Antonio Gramsci, a
founder of the Italian Communist Party, who had first been imprisoned
by the Fascist regime in 1926 despite his immunity from arrest as a
Member of Parliament, and who died of illness in Rome in 1937. His
burial in the cemetery was permitted apparently on grounds that his
Russian wife was non-Catholic. Benito Mussolini commented not long
after Gramsci’s death that while Gramsci-who had once been the Duce’s
Socialist comrade-had died peacefully in Italy, if he had gone to
the Soviet Union, as earlier proposed, he would have been executed
in Stalin’s great purges.
Almost three decades later, in 1964, the Italian Communist leader
Palmiro Togliatti died, of sickness, in the Soviet Union. He was one
of the many Italian Communists who had gone to the USSR in the 1920s
and 1930s, and many of them had indeed been shot in the purges. Not
Togliatti; to the contrary, as a Comintern leader he had signed off on
the arrests of many fellow-countrymen. (Giancarlo Lehner, journalist
and historian, has recently published three volumes, based on Soviet
archives, that tell the piteous story of the Italians who sought exile
in the Land of Socialism only to end with an NKVD bullet in the neck.)
When Togliatti died, the Soviet ambassador to Italy flew to Moscow
to accompany his body back to Rome. Togliatti, the ambassador told
the press, would be buried in the Cimitero Acattolico along with
Antonio Gramsci.
Not so, said G. Frederick Reinhardt. Mr. Reinhardt, a career officer
of the U.S. Foreign Service, had been the American ambassador to Italy
since 1961, and he chaired the committee of ambassadors overseeing
the cemetery. When the Soviet ambassador heard of Reinhardt’s stand he
asked to see him; unfortunately the American was too busy to receive
him. An Italian official told an American embassy officer informally
that the government hoped the burial could be permitted; the Communists
were a large party in Italy, and why cause trouble? (The American
suggested that if Togliatti were so important, perhaps he could be
put in the Pantheon alongside the two kings of Italy who lie there.)
Eventually the Soviet and American envoys spoke. Reinhardt reminded
the Russian that as a rule Italians could not be buried in the
cemetery. Perhaps, however, there was a way. Reinhardt had served in
the American embassy at Moscow during World War II, and he recalled
that the Soviet government had granted Soviet citizenship to Palmiro
Togliatti. If, said Reinhardt, the Soviet ambassador could just send
him a note confirming that the Italian Communist was actually a Soviet
citizen, Togliatti could be buried immediately at the cemetery. The
next day Togliatti was buried in the main Rome cemetery.
Mr. Reinhardt, who died in 1971 at the age of sixty, lies in the parte
antica. His family and his friends were outraged when in 1999 the then
Italian supervisor of the cemetery agreed that it might serve as the
locale for a show of modern art, with loud music, poetry readings,
and a bar serving drinks. Rome’s Mayor, Francesco Rutelli (who is
Italy’s Minister of Culture today), had agreed with the proposal. The
show opened. It was made clear to the organizers that they were making
more enemies than they could imagine. The show closed.
Today the Cimitero Acattolico seems safe from future art shows. It
has been neglected; it needs money; in 2006 the World Monuments Watch
listed the cemetery among its 100 Most Endangered Sites. There is
however revived interest in the cemetery on the part of the oversight
committee and its new chairman, the ambassador of Switzerland; and
there is a group of dedicated volunteers. What may in the end endanger
the cemetery more than anything else is the ever-increasing flow of
visitors to the Eternal City.
Peter Bridges is a former ambassador to Somalia, and cofounder of the
Elk Mountains Hikers Club in Colorado. He is the author of "Safirka: An
American Envoy" and "Pen of Fire: John Moncure Daniel." He is currently
writing a biography of Donn Piatt, diplomat, soldier, and editor.