A view of the Piazza di Spagna, Rome in 2020 (Webcam)
In these strange and difficult times, the K-SAA reflects on John Keats’s final months 199 years ago in 1821. Our thoughts turn to 26 Piazza di Spagna in Rome, now the Keats-Shelley House, a museum for the Romantic poets in the Italian capital – and of course, temporarily closed. The usually vibrant and bustling Piazza is startlingly quiet.
Watch a live feed of the Spanish Steps in Rome Here - Note the Keats-Shelley House to the right
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“John Keats spent his last months, weeks, days, hours at the house at the right of the steps, 26 Piazza di Spagna, with Joseph Severn. He died there on 23 February 1821, the news reaching London just this season, on March 17, 199 years ago. He had sent Severn to the Protestant Cemetery to describe his site of interment. Severn came back to report that in the turn of a mild Roman winter into an early spring, the graves were covered all over in violets. Keats sighed that he “already seemed to feel the flowers growing over him”–even as the world right outside, on the steps and in the Piazza, was busy with voices, carriage traffic, underscored by the soft rise and fall of Bernini’s celebrated Barcaccia fountain “sinking day and night in its perpetual pale green waters” (as Stanley Plumley captures the sensation in his marvelous Posthumous Keats). In late winter 2020, the year of the Corona pandemic, Keats’s last place in Rome is as eerie, as posthumous, as Keats felt his own life to be, a strange and haunting sympathy across the centuries. Halfway up on the right side, you can see a banner with Byron, Shelley, and Keats, their avatars looking on …”
– Susan J. Wolfson and Stuart Curran
The Keats-Shelley House are conducting a synchronised reading group from Wednesday 1 April. See their Twitter page for more details.