Last Day in Italy (Part 2)

We are in Rome's "metropolitana" which unlike many other European metro systems, is dirty, rundown, absolutely packed, and worst of all, full of thieves.

You feel nervous down here, the way you might feel in Mexico City's subway. You hold on tight to your bag and remain vigilant.

You travel the few stops packed like sardines.

There's an air of extreme paranoia and the slightest accidental brush of an arm or any physical contact results in a dirty stare, flinching retreat or even a curse.


We are somewhere inside the rabbit warren of connecting tunnels between platforms and as if on cue, there's a sudden shriek. A crowd collects, commuters gasp in horror, an army of security guards come rushing out of nowhere. A woman is lying face down on the escalators. She has been knocked down by a purse snatcher who is gone in a flash.

You thank God it wasn't you. You know everyone else is thinking the same thing.
We emerge into the light of day: Piazza Spagna, the "Spanish Steps".

Ugg! You catch sight of literally hundreds of people lounging all over the elegant scalinata which climbs toward Piazza Trinità dei Mont. There are lots of kids fooling around and people taking stupid photos of themselves. The scene resembles one of those overcrowded penguin colonies you see in documentaries about Antarctica. There is barely any room to make the ascent - so we give up on doing that too!

We've come to see the Keats-Shelley House, which luckily is at the foot of the Spanish Steps. I have a brief moment of dread. If there are this many people here in the piazza will it also be packed in the house?

But it's like stepping into another world...

The crowds are obviously not into the Romantics in the numbers I had imagined!

The house is almost empty. You make your way up a narrow staircase lined with portraits of Keats, Shelley, Byron and their contemporaries. You are welcomed at the reception desk and pay a small fee to enter this historical bubble. It's all polished wood, parquet floors, book-lined walls, sparkling vitrines which contain letters, drafts of poems, miniatures and personal keepsakes.

There are three rooms, each dedicated to the three poets. Why it is not called the Keats, Shelley and Byron House, I am not quite sure.

The commentaries in English (no Italian, which is a bit of a pity) provide some fascinating, and unexpectedly moving detail.

I was touched by the story of Keats' sister, Fanny, pictured here in old age. She saw little of her brother when she was younger but corresponded closely with him all of her life. Fanny treasured the letters throughout her life, while Keats asked her letters be buried with him in Rome.

In 1823 Fanny married a Spaniard, Valentin IIanos, who had seen her brother in Rome three days before he died. Not until 1861 did Fanny feel she could finally go to Rome herself to visit the grave of her brother.
At the house on Piazza Spagna she by chance met Keats' dearest friend, Joseph Severn, who was at the poet's bedside when he died.

He wrote:

For a long time we remained as if unable to speak ...'twas like a brother and sister who had parted in early life meeting after forty years. How singular that we should meet in the very place where Keats died.

Severn accompanied Fanny (who had travelled alone from Spain) to the cemetery where her brother was buried.

They planted two bay trees there.

The drowning of Shelley and his highly romanticised cremation on the beach by Byron and Co. (idealistically painted by Fournier in 1889) was apparently sheer fiction.

In pre-Victorian times it was English custom that women would not attend funerals for health reasons. Mary Shelley did not attend, but was featured in the painting, kneeling at the left-hand side. Leigh Hunt stayed in the carriage during the ceremony but is also pictured. Also, Trelawney, in his account of the recovery of Shelley's body, records that "the face and hands, and parts of the body not protected by the dress, were fleshless," and by the time that the party returned to the beach for the cremation, the body was even further decomposed. In his graphic account of the cremation, he writes of Byron being unable to face the scene, and withdrawing to the beach.

But one piece of "mythology" which may in fact be true relates to Byron whose good looks were said to be gob-smacking. There are several drawings and paintings of the great man on display.

I will leave it to you girls (and boys) to decide for yourselves.

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