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Updated: May 31, 2025
Angelo, and the tower, commonly called that of Nero, form the middle ground of the picture. The castle of St. Angelo appears again in one of his pictures of the Exposing of Moses; and the pyramid of Caius Cestius, the Pantheon, the ruins of the Forum, and the walls of Rome, may be recognised in the Finding of Moses, and several others of his remarkable pictures.
Mighty meat for little guests, when the heart of Shelley was laid in the cemetery of Caius Cestius! Beauty, music, sweetness, tears the mouth of the worm has fed of them all. Into that sacred bridal-gloom of death where he holds his nuptials with eternity let not our rash speculations follow him.
To see the sun shining on its bright grass, fresh, when we first visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep.
There was, moreover, some glimmering object visible by the torch-light hanging on to his cloak, and whining, probably Pitichinaccio. Next morning Doctor Splendiano was discovered at the Pyramid of Cestius, rolled up in a ball and immersed in his periwig, fast asleep, as though in a warm, soft nest.
Peter's, the Vatican, the Castle of St. Angelo, the Tiber with its great bends and many bridges, and to lonely, far-away Soracte; westward, on the other side of the river, rose the Janiculum with its close-wedged houses, grade on grade, and on its summit the church of San Pietro in Montorio and the flashing cataract of the Acqua Paola fountain, the stone-pines of the Villa Dolia cresting the ridge above; eastward, the Palatine, a world of ruins in a world of gardens, lay between us and the Coliseum, and over them and the wall, the aqueducts, the plain, the eye ranged to the snow-capped Sabine Hills, on whose many-colored declivities tiny white towns were dotted like browsing sheep; southward, we gazed down upon the Pyramid of Cestius, upon the beautiful Protestant cemetery with its white monuments and dark cypresses where lie Shelley and Keats, upon the stately Porta San Paolo, a great mediæval gateway flanked with towers, and beyond, the Campagna, purple, violet, ultramarine, oceanic, rolling out toward the Alban Hills, which glittered with snow, rising sharply like island-peaks and sloping down like promontories into the plain; and over all the sun and sky and shadows of Italy.
Such is the human mind, and so it peoples with its wishes vacancy and oblivion. See also pp. 69, 70. +Stanza 50,+ 1. 3. One keen pyramid. The dust of him who planned This refuge for his memory. Shelley probably means that this sepulchral pyramid alone preserves to remembrance the name of Cestius: which is true enough, as next to nothing is otherwise known about him.
Aurelian made use of that as a boundary we know: it stands at present half without and half within the limit that Emperor set to the city; and is a very beautiful pyramid a hundred and ten feet high, admirably represented in Piranesi's prints, with an inscription on the white marble of which it is composed, importing the name and office and condition of its wealthy proprietor: C. Cestius, septem vir epulonum.
To see the sun shining on its bright grass, fresh, when we visited it, with the autumnal dews, and hear the whispering of the wind among the leaves of the trees which have overgrown the tomb of Cestius, and the soil which is stirring in the sun-warm earth, and to mark the tombs, mostly of women and young people who were buried there, one might, if one were to die, desire the sleep they seem to sleep.
His idea, therefore, was that Signor Splendiano and little Pitichinaccio should go with him, just as they had done on the former occasion. But in addition to the spectres who had carried him off, all manner of direful apparitions had haunted Signor Splendiano on the night when he slept in his periwig near the Pyramid of Cestius.
The past is tremendously embodied in the hoary pyramid of Caius Cestius, which rises hard by, half within the wall and half without, cutting solidly into the solid blue of the sky and casting its pagan shadow upon the grass of English graves that of Keats, among them with an effect of poetic justice.
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