King’s College choir was due to sing at High Mass in Rome’s St Peter’s Basilica on the following afternoon. I decided I’d spend the morning visiting the area around Porta San Paolo, the southernmost of the gates that punctuate the Aurelian wall still surrounding the heart of the city.

The pyramid built as a tomb for Gaius Cestius, a magistrate, around 10 BC strikes an exotic note in the city. However, it was built at a time when things Egyptian were all the rage, especially as the battle of Actium, where a Mark Anthony seduced by Cleopatra was defeated by the future Emperor Augustus, was fought less than twenty years earlier.

The pyramid is only open by appointment. Luckily I managed to squeeze into a pre-booked group as one member hadn’t turned up. As explained by the well-versed young guide the pyramid is rather different from the archetypal pyramids near Cairo. It’s not just that it is much smaller – 36 metres high as against Cheops’ 139 metres – but that its angles are more acute that Cheops’s flatter outline.  In fact, the Cestius pyramid has proportions more similar to those found at Meroe in the lower Sudan. Furthermore, the pyramid is merely rubble covered with marble instead of being built with the huge blocks that characterise classic Egyptian pyramids.

The interior chamber is a little disappointing. It was largely despoiled by looters as seen in the tunnels dug into it and the frescoes are rapidly fading away. But at least I got into it, adding to my list of pyramid entrances – already three in Egypt and a couple in Mexico.

What is particularly and so poignantly captivating is the ‘Cimitero Acattolico’ nearby. This is Rome’s cemetery for all those who are not of Roman Catholic faith. My mother, who went to university in Rome, remembered it as an overgrown and neglected place with many broken tombstones – but then it was wartime and there was no preservation society such as exists today, excellently managed by Amanda Thursfield.

The cemetery is quite enchanting and beautifully kept and many of the tombs have been well-restored. The cemetery’s cats are also well-looked after and appreciated:

My first stop was at Shelley’s tomb which contains what was left of him when his body was washed ashore after his yacht went down in a great storm off the coast near Viareggio. (For more on this tragic story see my post at https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2016/02/09/loves-philosophy/ ).

The tomb’s inscription is Cor cordium (“heart of hearts”), followed by a quotation from the tempest:

Nothing of him that doth fade,
But doth suffer a sea change,
Into something rich and strange.

Next to his tomb is that of Edward Trelawney, friend and adventurer, who managed to snatch Shelley’s heart from his body which had to be burnt according to quarantine rules, and which now lies in St Peter’s churchyard in Bournemouth. (See my post at https://longoio2.wordpress.com/2017/06/15/cor-cordium/ ).

The other unmissable grave is that of John Keats who died in Rome of TB one year before Shelley was drowned. Strangely his name is not mentioned on the tombstone and the somewhat bitter inscription states that “This grave contains all that was mortal, of a young English poet, who on his death bed, in the bitterness of his heart, at the malicious power of his enemies, desired these words to be engraven on his tombstone: Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

 

To the right of Keats’ grave is that of Joseph Severn, the friend and painter who lovingly cared for the poet in his dying days.

The cemetery remains open for inhumations and among more recent inmates are American poet Gregory Corso and Dario Bellezza, the Italian poet and playwright.

It was now time to find my way to St Peter’s for King’s College choir’s second appearance in the eternal city.

There was absolutely no way of avoiding the queues – not even if I showed my King’s College member’s pass! There is strong electronic security one has to pass through. But I still managed to get to the church on time.

The choir was positioned to the left of that gigantic Berninian fantasy, Saint Peter’s throne, and was fortunately in a good acoustical spot well away from the resounding cupola.

For the ordinary of the Mass the choir largely chose pieces from Palestrina’s Missa Papae Marcelli and some of the lovely English renaissance music they’d sung at the previous evening’s concert in Santa Maria Maggiore. Everything went very smoothly indeed. There was a little amusement at that part of the Mass where handshakes are given all round by the congregation as a sign of peace. The choirboys, in particular, made quite a feast of this bit!

The singing, as always, was superb and was an example of what anyone coming to Mass at Saint Peter’s deserves to hear rather than the abysmally low standards generally displayed there.

At the end of the service it was time for photograph taking but there was a slightly awkward moment when a grand old lady insisted on being included in every photograph of the choir. Thankfully a compromise was reached.

It was quite amazing to see King’s college choir transported from the austere gothic perpendicularity of their Cambridge chapel to the curvaceous theatricality of Saint Peter’s and I felt that their sound, too, had changed a little to a more Mediterranean tinge with louder than usual tenors. But perhaps it was just the acoustics. Here are some excerpts I recorded for your judgement:

My next stop after the heart of Roman Catholicism was to the heart of the old defence system and metamorphosed mausoleum of the Emperor Hadrian.  The basilica and the Castel Sant’Angelo are, in fact, connected by a passage on a wall and, unsurprisingly, my thoughts turned to another English connection with a wall built by the same emperor to keep out the barbarian Picts.