The Keats-Shelley Home, at the Spanish Steps

The season has changed and the mood has changed. Perhaps because it's cooler people dress up a bit more, perhaps it's just the way it is, the smaller number of people around are different people. Including cheerful Asian families. And other cheerful people, out on a sunny day, 25 October 2018.

We were with the writer family member, so we went to the house of Keats and Shelley, at the foot of the Spanish Steps.

There were, as in mud map below, other British and white American people around in Rome in this romantic era.

click to enlarge

Not just writers: Rome was the major destination of the Grand Tour, an institution that persisted for as long as only persons of means or somehow of driven purpose could make it to Italy and thus carry a badge of status, almost like but very different from the hats that can be worn by the Haji, the mark of having done the Haj.

The house is named for Keats and Shelley, you can see the bed where Keats died. Shelley drowned when his boat sank well north of Rome. He was cremated, but his heart did not burn. Mary Shelley kept Percy's heart in her desk drawer. Do note that Mary had already created the character of Frankenstein years earlier in Switzerland when on a rainy afternoon a bunch of these romantics sat around and asked each other to invent something spooky.

Byron was there, though the house does not bear his name. Perhaps because the house was set up in a time of mush and gush about the romantics, a time when Byron was still regarded as just a bit wild. As indeed he was, his major work Don Juan was an attack on the establishment back in England and the dedication was suppressed in his lifetime. He left the comforts and loveliness of Rome to become a hero in the Greek war of independence. And die there.

It's nice to imagine these guys sitting up here, checking the queue on the steps of people lining up to get their books signed,
sending the major domo down to manage the queue, asking for tea to be brought from
Mrs Babbington's Tea Room over on the other side of the steps
...though I'm not sure that Mrs Babbington had arrived then yet.