 Grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley On July 8th, 1822, less than a month short of his thirtieth birthday, the English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in a boating accident in the Mediterranean Sea.
His body was washed ashore ten days later and was cremated on the beach at Viareggio (Tuscany), in compliance with the quarantine rules of the time. Shelley's ashes were sent to Rome for burial in the city's cemetery for non-Catholics, where his son William (1816-19) was interred. Shelley's gravestone bears the Latin inscription, Cor Cordium (Heart of Hearts), and, in reference to his death at sea, a few lines from Ariel's song in Shakespeare's The Tempest: 'Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.' Comments are closed.
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Blogging about Rome,
its art, history and culture. My name is David Lown and I am an art historian from Cambridge, England. Since 2001 I have lived in Italy, where I run private and
small-group walking tours of Rome. Search Walks in Rome:
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September 2020
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