IV.i. Flowers at the Forgotten
"Here lies one whose name was writ in water."
- Epitaph of John Keats
"Well, this is thoroughly depressing," I repeated to my brother as we looked at the little tombstone and the pathetic collection of withered flowers in front of it. I ritually added a daisy I had picked by the road, since the flower shop that could have sold me violets wasn't open yet. A lonely speckled white cat wove through our ankles. The place is a haven for strays. It was a rainy Saturday morning in the Protestant, or more correctly the acatholic, cemetery of Rome, a place that somehow still manages to fall within the universality of the city's walls, though just barely. A symapthetic Pope was gracious enough to let these dead heathens stay, albeit out by the Porta Ostiense, the ages old road entrance to the eternal city from its port on the sea. The cemetery is encircled on one side by Aurelian's massive ramparts and on the other by a rustic and rather English looking brick wall that looks as paltry and out of place in this grand city as does the stodgy All Saints' chapel near the Spanish Steps, that might as well be in Rosedale or Warwickshire. Cauis Cestius' huge travertine marble pyramid, an equally incongruous monument, rubs shoulders with the cemetery walls here. Such a collection of funerary follies should come as no surprise; Rome is a city the buried and a city of the unearthed.
But why am I preoccupied with these things? I wouldn't consider myself particularly morbid. In fact, I tend to believe in the life of things that most others believe dead. Still, there were things that needed to be done on this trip, important things. I set out to do them on a pilgrimage of sorts.
There are still a lot of true pilgrims who come to Rome. In terms of sheer numbers, probably more than have ever come in any other century, but they are far outnumbered by the hoards, the bus tours and the backpackers who want to glimpse at the grandeur of what to them is nothing but a fictive dream. We mingled with them as we checked in at our eccentric youth hostel. A Californian named Joseph was working at the desk. He explained to me, after recommending the Borghese (he pronounced it bor-geez) Museum and the Da-lee exhibit in Venice, that he had run out of money while traveling and so had been working here at the Alessandro Palace Hostel for twelve days. We also met Pete, heading towards the Amalfi coast while his ex-girlfriend struggled with their three year old child in Vancouver, and an Argentinian who only spoke Spanish, and who said long prayers before going to bed.
In Saint Peter's a Japanese tourist laughed while pretending to cross himself at a holy water stoop, only so that the moment could be recorded on film. This wasn't as bad as the Frenchman I once saw piss against the façade of Reims cathedral, the place where his kings were crowned for a thousand years, or the matrons who bring their poodles into Marseille churches to keep themselves company. The Vatican is important enough to warrant ushers who attempt to prevent the altogether untoward from occurring, but they are no real deterrent. Lhasa is unreachable, Jerusalem unsafe, and Mecca unwelcoming, so the masses come here to mock, or at least gawk at, the strangeness of things they don't understand. Despite them, Catholicism, that dominant world religion, is still a sacred thing, and Rome, for all its decay and crumbling layers of history, is still the nominative centre of the world, simply by default of being the only city to actually declare itself so.
Cecilia, certainly out of Carrara (for she was whiter than Travertine), had her face wrapped with a shroud and a gory incision in her neck. Other than that, she was as beautiful as ever. This is how she looked when they exhumed her body in 1599. Her miraculously preserved remains were immortalized by Stefano Maderno, an otherwise unknown sculptor, and it rests here in the altar, under the gaze of glowing golden mosaics, in her church in Trastevere. In 230, after unsuccessfully trying to scald her, they reverted to beheading her. Her body, long believed lost, was found by Pope Paschal in the ninth century, and it has rested here ever since. I don't doubt that this is true, but only chuckle at the though of many an ancient Pope searching the catacombs outside Rome for the precious relics of a saint. I can't imagine such things being on the current Pontiff's daily schedule.
We stopped, on the quiet pilgrimage, at the Keats-Shelley house. Just outside, the hubbub of the Spanish Steps contrasts with the smoking room atmosphere of the small museum. Set up and frequented only by aficionados, it is as strange and decontextualized a place as Babington's English teahouse across the way. Inside, its oak bookcases are lined with leather-bound books and memorabilia. Other than a few letters, nothing is original. After Keats died from consumption the papacy ordered everything in the place to be burned in an attempt to prevent contagion. It was purely a medical decision. They had nothing against the late poet personally; how could anyone holy disagree with the man who wrote Saint Agnes' Eve?
Earlier in the day a few people stared, though not too many, when I put the rose on Raphael's tomb in the Pantheon. The majority is here to admire the great coffered dome, a feat of Roman architecture, or the monuments to several feckless Italian kings, not this quiet tomb (though altogether not as quiet that of a certain Young English Poet). The greatest painter who ever lived, dead at thirty-seven. He beat out Keats, his lyrical equivalent, by twelve years, and Cecilia, his hagiographical one, by a good twenty.
Around the corner, another tomb in another church; this time Fra Angelico, the Dominican turned painter, happy in the village of Fiesole but summoned to Rome to paint for the Pope, only to die a few years later. When he was invited to dine with Nicholas V, he politely refused to eat the meat offered to him because he lacked permission from his prior. Worse, he declined the position of archbishop because he deemed himself unworthy. I can only thank him; if he had accepted the job he would undoubtedly have painted less, and there would have been tears of omission. His tomb was the least sorrowful of all those I had visited, for some fascist-era renovation had given him a bronze wreath and some sacristan had lit a few candles. Artists always get the best graves, I realized. From me he got a white lily.
Back at the cemetery, a quick visit to Shelley's grave. About it he wrote that "it might make one in love with death, to be buried in so sweet a place". No one second-guessed him when his drowned body washed up on the shore at La Spezia, though he was cremated on the beach and only his ashes lie here. Another cat, this time charcoal black, observed us. Alex and I pondered the possibility of reincarnation, then left.
Keats' grave
A Plaque in the Keats-Shelley House
The Rose on Raphael's tomb
The sempiternal Swiss Guards
The brothers in Saint Peter's square…
… and on the Capitoline Hill
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