The Monte Testaccio, a hill less than two hundred feet high, starts abruptly out of the rough plain in front of the English Cemetery. It is composed entirely of pot-sherds, broken crockery of all kinds, covered with a slow accretion of earth thick enough to sustain scanty vegetation. Why, when, and how, the extraordinary pile of refuse grew into its present proportions, is a mystery. It is older than the Aurelian wall in whose shelter nestles the Protestant burying-ground.
The custodian, always civil and obliging, learned to know and welcome us by and by, and after answering our ring at the gate would say, smilingly:—“You know the way!” and leave us to our wanderings. Boy had permission to fill his cap with scarlet and white camellias which had fallen from the trees growing in the ground and open air at mid-winter. I might pick freely the violets and great, velvet-petaled pansies covering graves and borders. When the guardian of the grounds bade us “Good-day” at our egress, he would add to gentle chidings for the smallness of my bouquet, a bunch of roses, a handful of double purple violets or a spray of camellias. We were at home within the enclosure, to us a little sanctuary where we could be thoughtful, peaceful—hardly sad.
“It is enough to make one in love with death to think of sleeping in so sweet a spot,” wrote Shelley.
“Strangers always ask first for Shelley’s tomb,” said the custodian.
It lies at the top of a steep path, directly against the hoary wall where the ivy clings and flaunts, and the green lizards play in the sunshine, so tame they scarcely stir or hide in the crevices as the visitor’s shadow touches them.
“PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY,
COR CORDIUM.
NATUS IV. AUG. MDCCXCII.
OBIT VIII. JULY MDCCCXXI.
Nothing of him that doth fade