Just outside the Piramide Station there really is a 37-meter high Egyptian-style Pyramid erected next to the Porta San Paolo. It was constructed in 12 B.C. by Caius Cestius as a tomb for himself. And behind the Pyramid, which was incorporated into the Roman Aurelian Walls in the third century, you will find the Protestant Cemetery, officially known as Cimitero Acattolico (Non-Catholic Cemetery).
The Protestant Cemetery is home to the English poet, John Keats, who died in Rome of tuberculosis in 1821. His tombstone reads: “This Grave contains all that was mortal of a YOUNG ENGLISH POET, Who on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart at the Malicious Power of his Enemies, Desired these Words to be engraven on his Tomb Stone: Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water. Feb 24th 1821”.
Another famous grave in this cemetery of non-catholics is that of another English poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who drowned in a sailing accident in the Gulf of Spezia in the summer of 1822. His tombstone reads: “Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.”
This beautiful grieving angel, draped over the grave of Emelyn Story, was the last work of her husband, the American sculptor, William W. Story, created in 1895 in her memory in the same year of her death.
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