ONE OF the loveliest places in all of Rome is a graveyard, writes Frank McNally.
"The Protestant Cemetery" it is usually misnamed, despite embracing people of all faiths, including communism. A popular - and equally incorrect - alternative title is the "English cemetery", which disregards the many Germans, Scandinavians, Greeks, and the smattering of Irish who ended up there.
But the official name reflects the site's function as a final resting place for ethnic and religious outsiders who, down the centuries, have died in the city of the popes. Even this - "L'Antico Cimitero per Stranieri Non-Cattolici" - is not completely accurate. Rome-born Catholics predeceased by non-Catholic spouses can also qualify for entry.
In any case, here, behind the Cestius Pyramid and the old city walls, some 4,000 souls repose in the most peaceful atmosphere imaginable. A few metres away is the Piazza di Porta San Paulo, where Rome's crazed drivers perform the modern equivalent of chariot-racing, as they do at every other junction in the city.
But inside the walls, among the pines and cypress trees, the most conspicuous sound is birdsong. The air is heady with jasmine, mimosa and orange blossom. And underlining the sense of utter calm, a few contented cats, owned by nobody but fed daily by volunteers, wander among the tombstones, occasionally rubbing against your ankles as you read the epitaphs and provoking thoughts about reincarnation.
It's easy to imagine how Shelley felt when, visiting the cemetery not long before taking permanent residence in it, he described how "it might make one in love with death; to be buried in so sweet a place".
The blissful surroundings only emphasise the harshness of another resident's self-penned epitaph, in which he rails against the "malicious power of his enemies". But Keats's bitterness is ameliorated somewhat by a plaque nearby that poetically adapts his own ironic inscription: "Here lies one whose name was writ in water". The water in which his name is writ, murmurs the plaque soothingly, has been supplied by the tears of visitors to his grave.
The cemetery's placid ambience contrasts with what was sometimes a turbulent history. Like the early Christians, who had to be buried several storeys deep in mazy catacombs on the city outskirts, non-Catholics were not always welcome in Rome.
As late as the 19th century, their burials had to take place by night, partly to avoid provoking trouble. Exceptions were made for mourners who pleaded ill-health or old age - one such being the elderly Sir Walter Synnot, former high sheriff of Co Armagh, who in 1821 was allowed to bury his daughter by daylight, albeit with mourners accompanied by mounted police "in case they should be insulted". When Sir Walter himself expired a few months later, the funeral was by torchlight.
OF ALL the cemetery's monuments, perhaps the most picturesque is the "Angel of Grief", which weeps over the grave of the man who carved it, the American sculptor W.W. Story. By contrast, the most conspicuous shrine within the walls is that surrounding the otherwise simple tombstone of the father of Italian communism, Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci was jailed by the fascists in 1928 until, his health destroyed, he was released to die, aged 46. Now his grave is decked with huge wreaths from Italy's various left-leaning parties.
Gravestones compete for our attention in different ways. In the 19th century, clearly, epic epitaphs were the fashion. Some of these have not aged well, being so high-flown and verbose as to have acquired unintended comic qualities for a modern reader.
But visiting the cemetery towards the close of the 1800s, Henry James was struck by the unusual candidness of the inscription for one Rosa Bathurst, written by her mother, whose husband - an English diplomat - had died in mysterious circumstances some years before. It had, James wrote, "an old-fashioned gentility that makes its frankness tragic". And 170 years on, the epitaph retains the power to move:
"Beneath this stone are interred the remains of Rosa Bathurst, who was accidentally drowned in the Tiber on the 11th of March 1834 whilst on a riding party, owing to the swollen state of the river and her spirited horse taking fright. She was the daughter of Benjamin Bathurst, whose disappearance while on a special mission to Vienna some years since was as tragic as unaccountable: no positive account of his death ever having been received by his distracted wife.
"He was lost at twenty-six years of age. His daughter, who inherited her father's perfections, both personal and mental, had completed her 16th birthday when she perished by as disastrous a fate.
"Reader. Whoever thou art who may pause to peruse this tale of sorrow, let this awful lesson of the instability of human happiness sink deep in thy mind: If thou art young and lovely, build not thereon, for she who sleeps in death under thy feet was the loveliest flower ever cropt in its bloom. She was everything that the fondest heart could desire or the eye covet, the joy and hope of her widowed mother who erects this poor memorial of her irreparable loss. Early, bright, transient, chaste as morning dew, she sparkled, was exhaled, and went to heaven."