Today we continue our week-long Text & the City series with a visit to the Keats-Shelley House:
In the era of the Grand Tour, the now-swanky neighborhood around the Spanish Steps was known as the English Ghetto, for it was there that English-speaking travelers and expatriates made their homes. Among those resident in the area were a large number of literary greats whose presence in the city is now attested by marble plaques hanging on the sides of buildings that say things like, “Here the Poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote his play The Cenci.”
In residence in Rome at the same time as the illustrious Percy Shelley was the poet John Keats, whose tenure in Eternal City proved to be a very short one. Suffering from consumption, Keats and his friend Joseph Severn traveled from England to Rome in search of a dry and warm climate in the latter part of 1820. By the time they arrived in the Eterna, Keats’ illness was quite advanced and the young poet was scarcely able to enjoy the Romantic pleasures of Rome.
The sickly Keats and his friend Severn set up housekeeping in a majestically-placed but modest pensione. They had a bedroom that looked out at the Spanish Steps and a living room that faced Piazza di Spagna. As there were not kitchen facilities, meals were brought in by local restaurants.
Keats died in that pensione Rome in February of 1821 - he was neither wealthy nor well-known at the time. And though his possessions and furniture were burned after his death in 1821 (Roman law required this following death by a disease like tuberculosis), the building that housed Keats’ rooms was purchased by the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association and restored in the early twentieth century (click here to read how that series of events came about). It now houses a museum and one of the finest libraries of Romantic literature in the world.
Now many thousands of literature lovers and curious tourists make pilgrimages to the Keats-Shelley House each year. On view in the museum is an extensive collection of paintings, objects, and manuscripts celebrating the lives of Keats, Shelley and Byron, as well as locks of Milton and Elizabeth Barrett’s hair, a manuscript and poem by Oscar Wilde, and splendidly bound first editions and letters by Wordsworth, Robert Browning, Joseph Severn, Charles and Mary Cowden-Clarke.
You can learn more about the Keats-Shelley House by visiting their website, where you can take a virtual tour. Or, if you’re headed to Rome and want to do as the poets by immersing yourself in the literary scene, consider renting the first-floor apartment available in the Keats-Shelley House. It’s available for short-term rentals ranging in length form 3 nights to 6 months, is suitable for one person or a couple, and has an outside terrace. Further information available at info@keats-shelley-house.org
