Percy Bysshe Shelley

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The grave of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
Cimitero acattolico (Non-Catholic Cemetery)
Via Caio Cestio
Rome, September 2019

“On 1 July, Shelley and Edward Williams sailed in Shelley's new boat the Don Juan to Livorno where Shelley met Leigh Hunt and Byron in order to make arrangements for a new journal, The Liberal. After the meeting, on 8 July, Shelley, Williams and their boat boy sailed out of Livorno for Lerici. A few hours later, the Don Juan and its inexperienced crew were lost in a storm. The vessel, an open boat, had been custom-built in Genoa for Shelley. Mary Shelley declared in her ‘Note on Poems of 1822’ (1839) that the design had a defect and that the boat was never seaworthy. In fact the Don Juan was overmasted; the sinking was due to a severe storm and poor seamanship of the three men on board. Shelley's badly-decomposed body washed ashore at Viareggio ten days later and was identified by Trelawny from the clothing and a copy of Keats's Lamia in a jacket pocket. On 16 August, his body was cremated on a beach near Viareggio and the ashes were buried in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome. The day after the news of his death reached England, the Tory London newspaper The Courier printed: ‘Shelley, the writer of some infidel poetry, has been drowned; now he knows whether there is God or no.’ Shelley's ashes were reburied in a different plot at the cemetery in 1823. His grave bears the Latin inscription Cor Cordium (Heart of Hearts), and a few lines of ‘Ariel's Song’ from Shakespeare's The Tempest:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea change
Into something rich and strange.

” (Percy Bysshe Shelley, Wikipedia)