Il Cimitero acattolico di Roma. La presenza protestante
nella città del papa. Antonio Menniti Ippolito, Viella, 2014. Updating and expansion, based on further archival
research, of his essay in the ‘Parte Antica’ volume
(see below). Provides fundamental source material about
the origins of the Cemetery and the Catholic church context.
The Protestant Cemetery in Rome: the cemetery of artists and poets.
Johan Beck-Friis, Malmö: Allhems Förlag, 1956. The standard brief illustrated history of the Cemetery, with a list of notable graves. Frequently reprinted with minor additions,
it is available in German, Italian and English editions.
The Protestant Cemetery in Rome: the "Parte Antica"
edited by Antonio Menniti Ippolito and Paolo Vian, Roma: Unione Internazionale degli Istituti di Archeologia, Storia e Storia dell'Arte in Roma, 1989. The result of an intensive research project into the Parte Antica by the British and Swedish institutes in Rome. Most of the volume is in English, with the two main chapters on the early history of the Cemetery in Italian and German.
All'ombra della Piramide: storia e interpretazione del Cimitero acattolico di Roma
Wolfgang Krogel, Roma: Unione internazionale degli istituti di archeologia storia e storia dell'arte in Roma, 1995. The
most detailed account of
the development of the Cemetery
in its wider historical context,
drawing upon archives
in Rome and a wide range
of published sources.
La
piramide di Caio
Cestio e il cimitero
acattolico del
Testaccio
Chiara
Di Meo, Roma: Palombi editori,
2008. A historical
study of the Pyramid and
Cemetery in the context of
attitudes towards death,
richly illustrated by contemporary
engravings and paintings
of both monuments (out of print).
The titles listed above are available at the Visitors’ Centre of the Cemetery. Enquiries to: visitorcentre@cemeteryrome.it
Articles
Nicholas Stanley-Price and Elania Pieragostini. Thomas Jones’s excursion to the English Cemetery and Testaccio in Rome, 1777, in British Art Journal XXIII, no. 2 (Autumn 2022),79-85. 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 area’s 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.
Nicholas Stanley-Price. The sacrosanct status of the graves of Keats and Shelley in the 20th century. Keats-Shelley Review 35,1 (2021), 64-79. https://doi.org/10.1080/09524142.2021.1911183 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.
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 enjoyed a privileged position. It also puts into context the threat in the late 19th century to have the grave demolished.
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 aspect of his posthumous fame that has not hitherto received much attention.
Nicholas Stanley-Price. Foreigners only! The cemetery for non-Catholics in Rome.
In Foreigners in significant cemeteries (ed. Andreea Pop), Association of Significant Cemeteries in Europe, AGM, Bucharest, 2015, 60-64. 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.
Sculpture in the Non-Catholic Cemetery of Rome
Christina Huemer,
Final English draft text written by the author in 2007, published
in Italian as:
La scultura nel Cimitero acattolico di Roma, in Lo splendore della forma. La scultura negli spazi della memoria (a cura di Mauro Felicori e Franco Sborgi). Bologna: Luca Sosselli editore, 2012, 204-214
Describes a selection of the Cemetery’s more notable sculptures in the context of the Cemetery’s history(for the illustrations, see the published Italian version, also posted
here as a pdf)
A short account of the significance and conservation of the Cemetery, part of a series by invited authors on "My favourite..."
