4 Comments

  1. Let me add here…no one can take out history and heritage from you, wherever you may be! 🙂
    I can completely understand your love for cemetery!

  2. Thank you, for the wonderful photos !
    “As one enters Rome from the Via Ostiensis by the Porta San Paolo, the first object that meets the eye is a marble pyramid which stands close at hand on the left.
    There are many Egyptian obelisks in Rome – tall, snakelike spires of red sandstone, mottled with strange writings, which remind us of the pillars of flame which led the children of Israel through the desert away from the land of the Pharaohs; but more wonderful than these to look upon is this gaunt, wedge-shaped pyramid standing here in this Italian city, unshattered amid the ruins and wrecks of time, looking older than the Eternal City itself, like terrible impassiveness turned to stone. And so in the Middle Ages men supposed this to be the sepulchre of Remus, who was slain by his own brother at the founding of the city, so ancient and mysterious it appears; but we have now, perhaps unfortunately, more accurate information about it, and know that it is the tomb of one Caius Cestius, a Roman gentleman of small note, who died about 30 B.C.
    Yet though we cannot care much for the dead man who lies in lonely state beneath it, and who is only known to the world through his sepulchre, still this pyramid will be ever dear to the eyes of all English-speaking people, because at evening its shadows fall on the tomb of one who walks with Spenser, and Shakespeare, and Byron, and Shelley, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning in the great procession of the sweet singers of England…
    As I stood beside the mean grave of this divine boy, I thought of him as of a Priest of Beauty slain before his time; and the vision of Guido’s St. Sebastian came before my eyes as I saw him at Genoa, a lovely brown boy, with crisp, clustering hair and red lips, bound by his evil enemies to a tree, and though pierced by arrows, raising his eyes with divine, impassioned gaze towards the Eternal Beauty of the opening heavens. And thus my thoughts shaped themselves to rhyme:
    HEU MISERANDE PUER
    “Rid of the world’s injustice and its pain,
    He rests at last beneath God’s veil of blue;
    Taken from life while life and love were new
    The youngest of the martyrs here is lain,
    Fair as Sebastian and as foully slain.
    No cypress shades his grave, nor funeral yew,
    But red-lipped daisies, violets drenched with dew,
    And sleepy poppies, catch the evening rain.
    O proudest heart that broke for misery!
    O saddest poet that the world hath seen!
    O sweetest singer of the English land!
    Thy name was writ in water on the sand,
    But our tears shall keep thy memory green,
    And make it flourish like a Basil-tree.”
    Oscar Wilde, Rome 1877.

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