The Tomb of Shelley

Having died at sea, Shelley’s tomb is inscribed with Ariel’s song from The Tempest.

Shelley had originally planned to have himself buried in the old part of the Non-Catholic cemetery in Rome, near to his infant son. The story goes that in Shelley’s presence the supposed site of his son’s body was dug up so as to ensure its location. Instead of the body of an infant, the body of a grown man was found. Shelley, who must have been distraught at the implications of the absence of the boy’s body, was therefore forced to abandon the wish to be buried with his son, and had to settle for an approximation. In 1822, a year after Keats’ death, Shelley too joined him under the shadow of the Cestius pyramid. After only a few weeks there, “Byron’s Jackal”: Romantic hanger-on, groupie and all-purpose wild man Edward Trelawney exhumed Shelley’s ashes and had them reburied in another part of the cemetery, buying up the adjacent plot for himself, where he himself was buried nearly 60 years later. Trelawney seems unable to have kept his hands off Shelley’s remains: he had, during Shelley’s cremation on a Tuscan shore, reached into the pyre and plucked Shelley’s heart from the decomposed and flaming carcass.

Trelawney with Shelley as Severn with Keats: the surviving and less famous friend contrived to have themselves buried next to their heroes, ensuring that not just their remains but also their posterity will ever be undivided. A century later Gregory Corso, a beat poet, began riding the same coat-tails, successfully convincing the authorities to carry out his request to be buried at "the feet of Shelley". Somehow this grovelling-in-perpetuity, a search for reflected glory, has been mistaken for an achievement of linked memory. Why not quote Shelley in his epitaph if his intention was purely memorial? Now the story has overshadowed the man: Corso's tomb is not a testament to Shelley or indeed to Corso, but is an act in itself whose history supercedes its interred. It has become a memorial to itself, to its own assumed vanity.

The tomb of Shelley had recently been given an artless “makeover”, one of the cemetery’s proud expat volunteers told me. The “ugly old ivy” had been ripped up, and the whole thing surrounded by bark chips, like a children’s playground. A small ornamental maple (I would've called it an acer) had been planted on his grave. She had no idea why they had chosen a maple to plant on Shelley’s grave.

This intervention on Shelley’s tomb is a gross act, lacking in tenderness or meaning. The aesthetic taste of the current crop of volunteers, namely of late twentieth century horticultural bourgeoisie: gardens as decking and woodchip, has been imposed onto Shelley’s memory into posterity. A maple tree for no particular reason will now entwine through his bones. In one sense, for those whose understanding of the world is of a place that doesn't have quite enough right-angles, this is an improvement of Shelley’s grave. But in another, more accurate sense, it’s an act of staggering short-sightedness and arrogance. If the intention was to somehow improve Shelley’s grave, I fear the cemetery committee are labouring under a misapprehension. It is not possible to improve a grave qua grave, other than stopping it from falling into complete disrepair. As a site of poetic pilgrimage, this grave’s purpose is to be a focal point for those who wish to remember Shelley. As such it should allow a space for connection and reflection, a little doorway into an imagined place in which we the living can summon some ephemeral sense of the departed.

Gone from here the wild violets and ivy of old, the wild memory of Shelley: the eloping lover, the romantic poet, adventurer and soldier, cremated on a Tuscan shore, laid to rest amongst the rambling idyll of this place, under the shadow of the pyramid, shepherds reposing nearby (cf Keats). Welcome instead Shelley: tidy and material, bijou yet deceptively spacious, benefiting from a dual aspect and enviable transport links, refitted, brushed-up, unsentimental. Shelley’s tomb, through the wanton contemporaneality of a few people, no longer suggests anything rich or strange.

The Spectre of Reality: The Non-Catholic Cemetery, Rome

Two views of the beautiful Non-Catholic Cemetery, with the pyramid in the background, before the dawning of the brutal reality

The Non-Catholic Cemetery appears at first sight to be idyllic: intricate, bright and green. The tombs are tightly packed, reminiscent of the Tikhvin Cemetery in St Petersburg. Tall cypress trees add the most beautiful verticality to the horizontal rows of tombs: trees which really strain upwards like gothic spires, or needles injecting the earth into space, the mortal into the spirit world. The ludicrously picturesque Roman pyramid of Caius Cestius abuts one wall.

The cypresses, towering over the tiny gravestones, vaulting like the columns of a gothic cathedral above floor slabs .

A Piranesi drawing of the pyramid of Caius Cestius

It is also a cemetery of eclectic peoples, beliefs and symbolisms. Keats is buried in one corner, and Shelley too. Gramsci, father of Italian communism, Marxist atheist and closet Christian, is interred near the ossuary, his grave garlanded with red flowers and red ribbons. Many of the gravestones are truncated or collapsed columns, indicating the grave of a child or young person. Amongst the gravestones can be found several Stars of David, including the Fischer brothers, buried beneath the same stone: one Christian, one Jewish. Orthodox and Lutherans, Cyrillic, German, Greek, Estonian and countless other languages and denominations lie side by side, interlaced in a unified non-Catholic firmament.

The shared stone of the Fischer brothers, with cross and star


The tombs of children and the young, symbolized by half-finished columns


A grave reading only: "Mother"

In spite of endless solicitations for donations and claims of being on the brink of collapse, it is easily the most industriously maintained cemetery I have ever seen. It took a while to realise, washed over as I had been by the graves of the poets and the scent of the pines that, staffed by tireless and ruthless volunteers, this cemetery is a deeply restless and intrusive place.

As I walked around, perfectly intact graves were being scrubbed, renovated, and even dug up; plants and trees were being uprooted and re-planted; lengths of hose, wooden planks and electric drills could be seen and heard. I was told that a large grant had been squeezed out of the German Embassy for the continued upkeep of the ‘German grave’, which was being brutally power-hosed and re-carved, and that the Cemetery committee was now pushing the Russian Embassy for cash to renovate their national memorial. So much for resting in peace.

Remains being exhumed

Perhaps the most ruthless example of this hard-headed intervention in the cemetery’s fabric is the inexorable exhumation of the remains whose families have not kept up with the required payments. On burial, a family can choose to buy the plot in perpetuity, or to buy a 30-year lease after which time their family will be asked to extend or the bones will be moved to the ossuary and the plot made available to the next customer. The cemetery committee wait, like parking wardens, for your time to expire. The volunteer relayed to me, utterly neutrally, how a young woman had come seeking her grandfather’s grave. She had seen a photo from the 1940s in which her father was standing by his father’s tomb. The young woman was told she was too late: the body had been dug up, the tombstone gone, his bones in the ossuary. The volunteer said they had either failed to contact anyone in the family or whoever they did find wasn’t interested. Little consolation to the man’s grand-daughter, who had made the personal pilgrimage to Rome to find and remember him.

Only a few years ago my family discovered that my great-great-grandmother, someone about whom we knew little, was buried in the Ancient Jewish Cemetery on the Lido in Venice in 1913. We were eventually able to find the grave, collapsed and overgrown, forgotten for nearly a century. Visiting, discovering her, was a privilege. We went on, as a family, to remove the ivy, have the collapsed columns and split flagstone fixed, and have new ironwork wrought. I know that at least materially it, she, will last till well after me and my children have forgotten it. No such privilege would be afforded us in the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome. As I walked around I came across two graves currently being dug up. I felt deeply sorry for those descendents who would come to seek their family in glorious and romantic Rome, the eternal city, and search in vain, finding corporeal reality in the place of sacred history.

Before and after: the tomb of my great-great-grandmother at the Jewish Cemetery on the Lido, Venice. On the left, as we found it, nearly destroyed; one the right, nearly finished. Not improved, but repaired.

As if perpetual interference in the repose of the dead were not enough, here the living must suffer it also. The sound of Rodrigo’s guitar concerto was wafting over the fragrant pine air. What was going on? What were those blocks hung on the walls of the cemetery? Not speakers? And then: “Ladies and Gentleman, the cemetery will close in 15 minutes, please make your way to the exit…”. Does the willful intrusion upon the peace of this cemetery never end? After five minutes of Rodrigo the guitar faded into a midi Air on a G-String. Over the next 15 minutes the announcement repeated multi-lingually until the we were informed that “the cemetery is about to close…”, and the large and expensive-looking electric iron gate, beeping and flashing like a reversing lorry, started to shut. It felt like some faceless public space: an airport or supermarket, where the presence of the individual is deliberately negated. We, mourners or pilgrims, were being treated like interlopers whose presence was resented but unfortunately necessary, herded around as if the intricate and personal symbology of making memorials were some material process like shopping or checking-in. Imagine if such invasiveness reared up during a moment of profound private contemplation. In spite of all the glamour of being buried in Rome, I would hate to be here.

Unfortunately, maintaining or repairing something is not synonymous, as the cemetery’s current crop of meddlers seem to think, with improving it. To maintain a grave is to stop it being destroyed by time; but to improve a grave, on the other hand, is a concept bordering on the oxymoronic. You can’t improve the grieving or memorial process. A cemetery should be a place of rest and calm, not one of change and improvement. Improving is not interchangeable with planning for the future: these improvements serve only to violently introduce the terrestrial present to a place where this reality should be excluded. Cemeteries are for us to remember the dead, to reflect upon them and upon us. They could be grand like Verano, wild like Highgate, intense and historic like Tikhvin, alive like Oaxaca, but they must allow in some way the dead to rest and the living to engage with them. To do this they should nurture a sense of timelessness, allow the past to continue to be somehow just also present, where the gossamer membrane between the bereaved and the deceased is momentarily dissolved. A cemetery should somehow act as a metaphorical rope-bridge which momentarily and temporarily allows us to cross over to the other side, be present there, and return to reality. In this resting space a psycho-spatial fissure opens in which the living can make communion with the dead. It must allow us to develop inside of us a place where we can locate our memories and feelings for those we have come to see, letting the spectre of reality loosen for the visit.

It seemed to be really fundamentally getting death wrong to treat a cemetery as a kind of pet project for a group of bored expats, an extended ornamental garden onto which to project merely contemporary tastes onto what should be a lacuna beyond time. Being deep-cleaned, power hosed, renovated, replanted and modernized drags the cemetery out of the timeless sacred and into the mundanity of the present. The despoilment of Shelley’s tomb is a gross example. The spectre of reality has infringed on the actuality of non-existence. The dead are beyond our human need to update and re-enliven. To re-introduce the real world into this place where living reality must be suspended is to deny the dead their identities, and in so doing, deny the role of mourner or pilgrim too. For who is a mourner if the deceased is stripped of the existential properties of restful death? This cemetery’s future is not secured by its zealous upkeep, but endangered.

The Tomb of Keats

Here lies one whose name was writ in water.

The tomb of Keats lies in a corner of the old part of the cemetery in the shadow of the steep, flat Roman pyramid. The stone was organised by Keats’ friend Joseph Severn, who is buried next to him. Severn died aged 85, 58 years after Keats’ death at 25.

It is truly an idyllic spot, and the surrealism of the rich grey pyramid evokes further the scene of some ruined elysium conceived in the mind of Piranesi.

Indeed, Severn wrote in a letter that he came to visit Keats only to find a shepherd asleep, “his head resting against the gravestone, his dog and flock of sheep about him, with the full moon rising beyond the Pyramid of Caius Cestius. One long moonbeam stole past the Pyramid and illumined the outline of the young shepherd’s face.”

Keats’ grave doesn’t record his name, which is only revealed on Severn’s grave adjacent. On Keats’ tombstone is engraved a lyre only half-strung; his poetic voice perpetually incomplete. The dedication is to "A young English poet". Below, the epitaph reads “Here lies one whose name was writ in water”. This monumentally touching grave is a colossal act of self-denial. Its power comes from here, from Keats' knowing subsumption from the individual to the undivided. In death we can no longer hide the subtle communion we are always taking with the world, a communion Keats in life had the art to describe. Unfortunately not everyone can appreciate that great power can come from great subtlety, and Keats’ subdued relinquishment of selfhood does not pass without comment. Nearby can be found a Victorian acrostic attempting to redress the ingloriousness of Keats’ epitaph through a kind of hyper-Keatsian overdone romanticism: “…if thy name be writ in water, each drop has fallen from a mourner’s cheek…” and so on. Keats follows introspection to the point of vanishing into the totality of life, beauty and reflection from which he had hardly felt separated. He was not afraid of this self-knowing doom and did not see it as a weakness that needed bolstering. Unfortunately the commissioner or author of this doggerel could not let Keats' silence be the last word. In case the visiting pilgrim was in any doubt, we are informed that Keats is “Not honoured less for Epitaph so meek!” Not everything that it true needs to be said.

Oaxaca Cemetery, Memento Mori

The cemetery in Oaxaca, Mexico, carries this inscription above its tall wrought-iron gates:

Postraos: aquí la eternidad empieza, y es polvo aquí la mundanal grandeza

Bow down: here eternity begins, and here mundane greatness is dust.

For whom is this profound observation made? What does it tell us about the attitude towards death of the people who built this cemetery? It is certainly the exact opposite of the Cimitero del Verano in Rome. The Verano tries to beguile us by its claim that death is not sufficient for mortality: that as we live, we can also be dead.

In Oaxaca, in the wonderful Mexican unmorbid fascination with death, the cemetery is not a memorial of achievements in life, but a perpetual memento mori, a reminder of mortality. Montaigne suggested that we should live overlooking a cemetery and never forget that this was our universal destination, echoing Ecclesiastes: “do not all go to one place?” This too is the Oaxaqueñan affirmation. Nothing remains of our earthly glory, not here, but dust. The cemetery itself is the ultimate leveler, in which the same fate awaits all and everything. In a necropolis like Verano on the other hand, the cemetery is filled with the vanity of individual greatness, a greatness which tries to generate a social order it had had in life.

We visited Oaxaca during the Day of the Dead. One evening we asked the hotel receptionist where he was going that night, and he said “To the cemetery, to have dinner with my grandfather.” The cemeteries in Oaxaca, at around midnight, are a riot of noise and colour. In one corner groups of mariachi bands were playing, sometimes in competition. On the other side, cramped under a candle-lit catacomb-lined colonnade, a full orchestra and choir were sweating their way through the Mozart Requiem. Some people were dressed-up festively as skeletons while others had come plainclothed, alone or with family, to an ancestral tomb to meet and remember the dead. Over some graves families ate picnics, over others pagan-catholic rituals were being performed. A pram, covered as all babies seem to be in Mexico in a large and thick fleece blanket, had been parked atop one grave's slab.


Each and every gravestone is garlanded with cempasúchitl, the orange and pink marigolds used only during Day of the Dead, and with ribbons, candles, sugared skulls and papier-mâché skeletons: there is no such thing here as an abandoned, forgotten tomb.


Skulls and skeletons are everywhere, hanging from rear-view mirrors instead of furry dice, as cakes, as masks. Outside the cemeteries are funfairs with dodgems, shooting arcades and candyfloss, full of dressed-up children and adults well into the night.

Above: A Day of the Dead procession, a comparsa, from a local school. As well as devils and skeletons, corpse brides were the most popular costumes. Right: This little Dracula was particularly convincing.

There are many comparsas run informally and institutionally. As well as these for children were wild midnight processions with allegorical characters and mezcal flowing freely.


The Day of the Dead has both a public and a private aspect. It is a national holiday, a celebration and a spectacle, a party which has the effect of reclaiming death from the mystical realm and placing it firmly into the processes of life. It is also a time in which personal mourning is condoned and encouraged. Privately, away from the crowds, or during the day, people engage in genuine acts of remembrance - eating together as families with the deceased, talking, drinking, feasting, dancing, laughing, praying, all at the grave itself.

If only we were as uncynical about the macabre. Then perhaps, as the hotel receptionist in Oaxaca had done quite naturally, I could have dinner with my own grandma, by her stone and her yew, in a Sussex graveyard. I would be thrown out by the neighbourhood watch. Like Foucault’s essay arguing that the Victorian obsession with repressing sex was in fact evidence of their compulsive perversity, is not equally the determination to back away from death evidence of a paralysing and obsessional morbidity? Is it more morbid to want to actively remember the dead, or to forget them and shrink from any such memorial communion? The more an activity is tabooed, the more attention we draw to this activity. To fudge our response to death reveals a greater and more abnormal fixation than to embrace it. We owe ourselves to be honest and positive, to demystify death, place it as a part of life, and cast off this embarrassment of communal remembrance.

One great print by Posada, the Mexican artist who effectively created the calavera images of dancing, living skeletons, is headed by a poem:

Gran fandango y francacela
De vivos y calaveras
En el Panteón de Dolores
Con música y borrachera

Great salsas and revels
Of living and skulls
In the Graveyard of Sadness
With music and drunkeness.

The extraordinary juxtaposition of intense grief and solemnity and wild careless abandon is one of the great and unique characteristics of Mexican life and culture. The closest equivalent is the Irish wake. While a wake is given for the deceased only once, Day of the Dead is an annual and nationwide act of remembrance. Perhaps because wakes are the sole condoned opportunity for 'positive grieving', they often tip from the celebratory into the nihilistic. The finality of the moment encourages the desire of drinking oneself too into oblivion.

Expressed in cemeteries across the country on November 1st through this deeply historic quasi-pagan practice, such 'positive grieving' is not taken literally to be communication with the dead like some macabre graveside seance. While transubstantiation may be possible according to some, literally contacting the dead would be nothing but superstitious esoterica. But positive grieving (such as partying on a grave) is not esoteric at all because it is not literal: it is symbolic and therapeutic. It is a reflective act of re-incorporation and closeness, a friendly way to remember parents and grandparents, to maintain the community of the family across the divide of life and death. They have the courage to acknowledge that this community always exists, and that it is far stronger than the filigree membrane of being alive that separates the bereaved from the deceased.

Cimitero del Verano, Rome, a true necropolis

Verano, a huge cemetery in south east Rome, is a necropolis in a quite different style to the other necropolis I know well - Highgate Cemetery in north London. Highgate Cemetery is designed to evoke the expectation expect death and the dead, it plays up to and exaggerates our need to create distance between life and afterlife: a deliberately eerie city for ghosts and ghouls, a macabre folly of catacombs and crypts, stoking the visitors’ romantic sentiments of otherworldliness.

Highgate Cemetery

Verano on the other hand feels like a living city, with streets and pavements lined neatly and consistently with tombs as suburban houses line arterial roads. Like in an endlessly repeating city such as Los Angeles, most of the tombs are utterly unremarkable, each with its own built-up and landscaped plot; but scattered amongst them are grand and wild mausoleums of another age, like the villas and palazzos of LA’s Golden Era, commanding art deco ziggurats frocked by palms, for those who in death wrote in stone their ambitions in life.

Ennis House, Los Angeles

Verano Cemetery, Rome

Yet unlike suburban sprawl, in a cemetery each tomb is remarkable. Each one is a specific life now turned to dust, a physical location in which an unfathomable and now intangible event is recorded. And how to record it? At Verano, a cemetery in which one can sense the whirr of a living city, humans sought the safety of immortality not just through a preservation in the stone of monument and mausoleum, but from the corresponding fossilization of the social stratum itself in which they lived. Like the urban living, these urban dead can live on as tiny placeholders in their own new metropolis, through a living social structure. Pine-lined avenues, roads and pavements, bins, cleaners and bin men, policemen on patrol, hawkers selling dried flowers, local visitors, relatives and tourists all accumulate to veil this dead space with the accoutrements of the living world. Yet a city is place where people live, so this city of the dead is a cemetery in denial. Those conditions of metropolitan functionality, the pragmatics of social living, have been transcribed into a place whose inhabitants have no need of them: they have already sold up and moved to the country. If ghosts are said to remain in the living world to make amends for tasks not done in life, then this cemetery in denial is a ghost town in reverse. Here, the living continue to haunt the dead, stalking their quiet tombs and avenues, building them the perfect city as if endlessly trying to repay to them some impossible debt.

A boulevard of the Verano Cemetery

For whom the cemetery?

The bell tolls for thee, not because you will die, but because you are alive.

It must be commonly understood that our rituals of death are no longer done for the dead. Maybe they never were. Ancient cultures, on the surface, performed rituals on their dead whose purpose was to assist them in their ongoing journey into the afterlife. These were rituals of preparation, providing the deceased with tools, weapons and bribes to see them through whatever would follow in their new quest - the quest for eternal peace, a peace which was not automatic, but had to earned in death as success had had to be earned in life. Once Christians introduced the fixed polarities of heaven and hell, the afterlife became a question not of journey but of destination. No longer were careful rituals of preparation required, since once the soul had crossed over to the other side there was no further doctrinally-verified journey to the final resting places of the dead. The dead Christian was faced with an instant judgment instead of an ongoing journey: his inverted meritocracy had sealed his destination already. He will arrive at the pearly gates to find his name already inscribed in one book or the other. There was now no space for the hero to battle his way into Elysium. Accordingly, the elaborate rituals of the pantheists and pagans were no longer needed and elaborate and morbid rituals of taboo performed at the point of death started to disappear.

Now, in the beginning of the psychological age, it is legitimate to say that all rituals for the dead are done for the benefit of the living. These rituals do not prepare the dead for their own afterlife, but prepare the survivors for their own life after the life of the deceased. Rituals form a symbolic closure to existence, and prepare the living for the journey of bereavement. Everything we do for the dead is not for them, but for us. This by no means belittles it: in fact I think it gives our actions in the face of this unknowable state a particular propitiatory poignancy. But it does mean that we can see, in our treatment of the dead, a reflection of ourselves. What we do for them is in fact what we do for ourselves, and is therefore what we want or need. Through actions for the dead we expose our own values and define our self-identity. In this light, what do we find out about ourselves in the remaining rituals surrounding death? What do we respect about ourselves in the way we respect our dead (even that we respect our dead)? And finally, what is our relationship to the necropolis and the cemetery, something we claim for the dead, but we make for the living?

The bell tolls for thee, not because you will die, but because you are still alive.