Italian luxury jewelry firm Bulgari is to help save the crumbling gravestones of Rome's Protestant cemetery, the burial place of English poets John Keats and Percy Shelley.
The five-acre graveyard, a haven of green in busy central Rome, has been listed as one of the most endangered sites on Earth by the World Monuments Fund.
According to administrators, the lush vegetation has grown out of control in some parts and general maintenance has been inadequate for decades. There are only two full-time gardeners and much work falls to volunteers.
A plan to stop the deterioration was recently drawn up with the help of conservationists, fundraisers and horticulturalists. Now the Bulgari family, some of whose members are buried at the site, has promised a 20,000-euro donation to pay for a new watering system for the plants and flowers.
"My aim is to encourage others to step forward and to help put this precious spot on a sound financial basis," said Nicola Bulgari, Vice Chairman of the Bulgari group. The cemetery, which has about 2,500 graves, receives no funding from the Italian State and relies on donations.
Another source of income is the steady flow of tourists - some 10,000 a year - who visit the graveyard. Since a cash crisis at the cemetery became known last year, several donors have come forward.
Among them are the Embassies in Rome of Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and Norway. The cemetery has been in use, in the Testaccio district, since at least 1738. Until the 19th century, the papal rulers of Rome ordered that non-Catholics who died in the city had to be buried at night, by torchlight, a long way from Catholic burial grounds.
In 1824 Pope Leo XII gave orders for the informal graveyard to be fenced off, to separate it from the nearby
countryside where prostitutes and brigands tended to congregate.
Since the end of the war, the job of overseeing the management of the site - commonly known as the 'Cimitero degli inglesi' (the English cemetery) - has rotated between the ambassadors from the 13 countries whose nationals are buried there.
The countries which form the cemetery's administration foundation are Australia, Belgium, Britain, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.
Its most famous graves are those of poets Keats and Shelley, both of whom died in Italy.
Keats died of consumption in 1821 and is buried in a quiet corner marked by a simple tombstone. He was only 25 but he was already one of the greatest Romantic poets writing in English.
Percy Bysshe Shelley also lived in Italy in the last years of his life, composing many of his finest poems as he
travelled throughout the country. He died in 1882, drowning when his sailboat capsized in the sea off Tuscany. He was cremated and his ashes buried in Rome.
