Arrivederci Cheapside

September 20, 2018 Comments Off

Literary Footprints 2018, our annual month of celebration of all things literary London starts on October 1st and you can find the full schedule of walks (over 60 this year!) by clicking the link above.

As an hors d’ouvre our guides will over the next couple of weeks be sharing snippets from their walks. Jill Finch is first out of the blocks with a story of a literary connection between Cheapside and Rome from her City by the Book walk, full details and booking information can be found on Jill’s walks page.

Keats and Shelley, two English poets whose words still drift through our City Streets, ended their days far from home and now lie in Rome’s Protestant Cemetery – a tranquil and breathtakingly beautiful place.

keats tombstone (unmarked at his request)

John Keats was born in Moorgate where his father ran an Inn. He later lived on Cheapside, trained as an apothecary near Blackfriars and a doctor in Southwark. He came to Rome on his doctor’s advice hoping to alleviate his tuberculosis but died within 6 months of his arrival in Italy. His poetry was scathingly criticised on initial publication but his early death cemented his reputation as a major Romantic poet.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, born into the peerage, was a radical who deserted his wife and ran off with 16 year old Mary Wollstonecraft whom he later married in St Mildred’s church, Bread Street, just off Cheapside (destroyed in 1941). Shelley wrote the poem Adonais as an elegy for Keats and since he felt that ‘Hell is a City much like London’ he too travelled to Italy, only to be drowned off its coast. His body washed ashore with a book of Keats’ poetry in his pocket. Cremated, Shelley’s ashes were interred in the Cemetery not far from Keats’ tomb.

Once part of the London Literati, their graves can now be found near one of Rome’s ancient gates and – bizarrely – in the shadow of a Roman Pyramid from around 18 BC.