Ancient Ruins Modern Remains

After seeing what Vatican City had to offer, we leapt a little further back in time to the Roman era, when we went to visit the Baths of Caracalla. The baths are in relatively poor condition, but the towering bits of wall, and broken fragments of mosaic floor that do remain, are enough to impart the general idea of the scale of these baths, if not their opulence. Caracalla makes the well preserved baths we visited in Pompeii seem quaint, in terms of scale. We wandered the ruins, identifying the various areas of the baths based on the wikipedia information we had. It is hard to imagine, as with the Coliseum, the marble walls and various decorations which must have once covered the bare brick that remains today. What is even more difficult to grasp in my mind is the engineering complexity of the baths. I want nothing more, after seeing the ruins, than to see a functioning replica of one of these baths. Preferable life size, but a scale model would do.

From Roman times back to the future, and a visit to Rome's Protestant Cemetery was next on our todo list.  The cemetery is easy enough to find, thanks to the prominent Pyramid which marks the grave of Caius Cestius, which well predates the Protestant Cemetery having been built around 15 BC. The Cemetery is all surrounded by a wall,

and through the gate is a surprising green landscape scattered with headstones of every type. Lounging in the pools of light amidst the greenery and blooms, was the odd cat, another sanctuary. The whole place has the feel, not of a burial ground, but of some secret garden. After the hordes of tourists at the Vatican, this place was purely abandoned. We had it to ourselves.

Besides a few interesting headstones, and the beautiful mourning angel, the cemetery is most well known for two of its residents, and their sidelong buried friends. The first of these is Percy Bysshee Shelley, who's wife penned Frankenstein, and who himself was an accomplished poet. My own favorite poem of his, and probably the best
known, is Ozymandias. He lies buried next to Edward John Trelawney, whose name I only noticed at the time because of one of Harry Potter's professors. But, as it turns out, Trelawney was a friend of Shelley, and when Shelly died in a boating accident in Italy, Trelawney was at the cremation, and took Shelley's heart, to give to Mary Shelley which she kept in a box until her death.

In a corner of the walled cemetery is the grave of John Keats, with its famous epitaph "Here lies one whose name was writ in water", but that's not all there is to the story. A friend of Keats, who was there with him through the final stages of his tuberculosis, abided by Keats's wishes by placing the epitaph , but not Keats's name on the tomb. This man, Joseph Severn used a sort of loop hole in Keats's dying wishes, and wrote a good deal more on that headstone instead. In full, 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. Feb 24th 1821. That same year, Percy Shelley, a friend, wrote Adonais in honor of Keats. But still, the story does not quite end there. In 1879, Joseph Severn died, and was buried next to Keats. As a final  honor to the dead poet, Severn's tombstone names the young English poet he is buried next to. Severn's inscription begins: To the memory of Joseph Severn, devoted friend and death-bed companion of John Keats, whom he lived to see numbered among the immortal poets of England.