Protestant Cemetery

We held class outside the Sede today, and on the agenda was the Aventine Hill area. We went to the top of the hill and got a beautiful view of the city, the Roseto Comunale - a rose garden in the shape of a menorah because it was built over an old Jewish graveyard, and the Knights of Malta priory, which has a keyhole that shows a miniature view of St. Peter's dome lined by trees. All of these were beautiful and definitely worth the walking, and I don't think I would have ever seen these had it not been for our class.


But the first thing we stopped at was really interesting. Right across from the Piramide Metro station is the Protestant Cemetery, where centuries of non-Catholics have been buried. Walking through the cemetery is a very peaceful experience, with birds chirping and room to walk along all of the numbered rows, housing hundreds of headstones. Cats are everywhere; the cemetery is yet another cat sanctuary in Rome, the other being right near Campo de' Fiori. Many of the epitaphs tell of people who were born elsewhere but came to Rome and wanted to rest forever here. I really liked this quote from Longfellow, which pretty much sums up many people's feeling about the city:

"There is the centre to which all gravitates
One finds no rest elsewhere than here.
There may be other cities that please us for a while,
but Rome alone completely satisfies.
It becomes to all a second native land by predilection,
and not by accident of birth alone."

The old cemetery is right next to the new one, but it doesn't hold nearly as many graves in the shadow of the Pyramid that is the memorial to Caius Cestius. It's path weaves in a distorted circle around a central grassy area, and in the upper left hand area is the grave of famed English poet John Keats, whose epitaph reads "Here lies OneWhose Name was writ in Water."

We got to spend about thirty minutes walking throughout the damp grass of the cemetery, and it made me really appreciate my family and the life I get to live everyday.

1. Publishing, DK. Rome (Eyewitness Travel Guides). New York: DK Travel, 2006.