The Non-Catholic Cemetery of Rome

Getting there

The cemetery is not on piazzale Ostiense, where the underground and the Pyramid come out: the entrance is on the other side of the monument.

• The address is via Caio Cestio 6, a side street off via Marmorata on the north side of the Pyramid. The gate is on the left halfway along the street, and it is not conspicuous
• Underground line B, Piramide station, and the same stop serves the Roma Ostiense trains. Tram 3 also runs here, along with buses 23, 30, 60, 75, 83, 95, 175 and 280
• You do not come here with the motorhome: this is inside Rome's limited traffic ring, the streets of Testaccio are narrow and there is nowhere to leave a long vehicle. The right way is the same as for the whole of Rome, which is to park the vehicle in a motorhome area and take the underground
• Just inside the gate, on the left, is the Visitors Centre: the volunteers are there, the map of the cemetery is on sale and the burials database can be searched. It is useful if you have come for one particular grave. But there are two different visits to be made here, and the other one belongs to those who are not looking for anybody: you go in and you lose yourself among the names, famous and less famous, of people who marked their own age and who are now here only to say that they passed through
• The cat colony cannot be reached from inside: it is in viale del Campo Boario, on the other side of the Pyramid, and you go down to it through a railing along the flank of the monument

Practical information

Contacts

Where it is

Roma · Lazio

You set off from

Notes

• Opening hours as stated by the official website: Monday to Saturday 9:00-17:00, Sundays and public holidays 9:00-13:00, with last admission half an hour before closing. Closed on 1 and 6 January, for a fortnight around mid August, and on 8, 24, 25, 26 and 31 December; early closing at 13:00 on Easter Sunday and Easter Monday, on 25 April, 1 May, 2 and 29 June. The cemetery warns that it may close without notice for bad weather or for safety reasons
• The contribution is five euros a head, left with the staff on the day of the visit, and it goes towards running costs. Three pages of the website call it voluntary and suggested, the frequently asked questions page writes that it is required: the amount is the same everywhere all the same
• You may take photographs, but you may not publish them. It is the sharpest rule of the place and it is worth knowing beforehand: the regulations say that two or three photographs may be taken as a keepsake, that filming and shooting are allowed only for strictly personal use, and that photographs or films of the cemetery may not be published without the consent of the administration. We have asked for permission: if it comes, you will find our photographs of the inside here. For now there are the cats, which show no gravestones
• The other rules, and there are few of them and they make sense: the cemetery is private property and a working burial ground, you dress and behave with respect, you do not eat, drink or smoke, you do not light candles, you do not sit on the graves or lean against them, and dogs stay outside
• John Keats's grave, in the Old Part, does not carry his name. It 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.'" Above it is a Greek lyre with broken strings. Two things almost nobody knows: the carved date is wrong, it says 24 February 1821 and Keats died on the 23rd; and the line about his enemies is not his, it was insisted on by his friends Joseph Severn and Charles Brown, who later regretted it. Severn is buried beside him, under an identical stone, and between the two is the small stone of Arthur, his son, who died at eight months old
• Percy Bysshe Shelley's grave is in the New Part instead, up against the Aurelian Walls, and it holds his ashes: he drowned in the gulf of La Spezia in 1822 and was burned on the beach. The epitaph is COR CORDIUM, heart of hearts, and below it are three lines from Ariel's song in Shakespeare's "The Tempest". It was chosen by Edward John Trelawny, the friend who also bought the plot next to it and who has lain in it since 1881
• The Angel of Grief is the sculpture that makes it worth going in even if you know nothing about the rest. It was carved by William Wetmore Story in 1894 for the grave of his wife Emelyn, it was his last major work, and he died the following year and ended up in it himself. Funerary angels stand upright and point to heaven; this one has collapsed onto the altar, wings drooping, face hidden between its arms. It does not speak about the dead: it speaks about those left behind. The Guardian calls it one of the most copied images in the world, and the documented copies are at Stanford, in Brooklyn and in New Orleans
• Antonio Gramsci is here rather than at the Verano for a family reason and not out of secularism: the Schuchts, the family of his wife Giulia and his sister-in-law Tatiana, were Soviet citizens of the Orthodox faith. The ashes arrived in September 1938. On the small block in front of the stele L'Osservatore Romano pointed out a mistake that has stood there for eighty-eight years: CINERA instead of "cineres", which is the correct Latin for "ashes"
• Goethe's son. August von Goethe died in Rome in 1830, at forty, during his journey through Italy. On the stone there is a portrait medallion carved by Bertel Thorvaldsen, and the inscription GOETHE FILIVS PATRI ANTEVERTENS, Goethe's son who goes before his father. Old Goethe outlived him by two years and would have liked to be buried here as well: he is at Weimar
• The others, in no particular order: Carlo Emilio Gadda, whose ashes were moved here in 2000 as he had wished; Andrea Camilleri, since 2019; Giorgio Napolitano, since 2023; the Russian painter Karl Brullov; the architect Gottfried Semper; the German painter Hans von Marées; the beat poet Gregory Corso, who asked to lie near Shelley and managed it; the African American abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond; the Swede Johan David Åkerblad, who worked on deciphering the Rosetta Stone; the dancer Lindsay Kemp, who taught David Bowie. And Sir James MacDonald, whose tomb was designed by Piranesi
• The Pyramid of Caius Cestius. It is the tomb of Gaius Cestius Epulo, one of the seven who looked after the sacred banquets, built between 18 and 12 BC: the date is pinned down between a law against luxury of 18 and the death of Agrippa in 12, whom Cestius's will names among the beneficiaries. It stands 36.40 metres high on a square base of 29.50, faced in marble from Luni. Cestius laid down in his will that it should be finished in three hundred and thirty days, on pain of his heirs losing the inheritance, and the clause is carved on the east side. It does not have the slope of the pyramids at Giza: it rises at about 68 degrees instead of their 52, which is why it looks so sharp. It survived because in the third century Aurelian took it into the Walls as a bastion, and nobody strips the marble off a military building still in use
• The Pyramid can be visited, but that is another matter. You do not get in from the cemetery: the entrance is on the other side, and the openings are decided by the Soprintendenza Speciale di Roma. After the restoration paid for with national recovery plan funds, a run of free openings, bookable through Eventbrite until 31 October 2026, was announced, in slots of forty-five minutes
• The cats. The colony lives in the shade of the Pyramid and the cats wander into the cemetery. It started in 1984 almost by chance, with Matilde Talli, who got permission from the Soprintendenza to make a shelter inside the archaeological area; today it is run by the association ARCA - Gatti della Piramide, there are about fifty of them, and they can be visited from 14:00 to 16:00 every day, public holidays included. The cemetery's frequently asked questions page recalls that there was already a colony of cats here in 1850
• Porta San Paolo, that is, the ancient Porta Ostiense, is fifty metres away: the road to the port of Ostia started there. It had two archways between two semicircular towers, and between 401 and 403 Honorius reduced it to a single arch and raised the towers with battlements. Inside the gate is the Museo della Via Ostiense, with the model of ancient Ostia. On 10 September 1943 this was where the Italian army made its last attempt to stop the German occupation of Rome, and there are plaques on the walls that remember it
• Take care not to confuse it with the Rome War Cemetery, which is a few hundred metres away, in via Nicola Zabaglia, on the other side of Monte dei Cocci. That one is a Commonwealth military cemetery, opened on 3 June 1944 right after the liberation of Rome, with 426 burials and rows of identical headstones. Anyone looking for "the English cemetery" risks ending up in the wrong one. The only real link is seven Commonwealth war graves that lie inside the non-Catholic cemetery, six from the First World War and one from the Second

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