Late in the eighteenth century, above all in the wake of the French Revolution, there was a European revolution in funerary customs.  Landscaped cemeteries (inspired by Romantic English gardens as Elysian Fields) and other separate burial grounds were created, mostly outside cities.  Père Lachaise in Paris (1804-5) was the first, most famous, and an exemplar for later European cemeteries.  (Papal Rome established its first modern Cemetery at Verano in 1834.)

At the same time there was a growing need in Italy to provide burial space for non-Catholics.  According to the ecclesiastical laws of the Catholic Church, Protestants can be buried neither in Catholic churches nor in consecrated ground.  Non-Catholic burial places came into use comparatively early in some much-visited Italian harbour cities, such as Livorno (from 1598) and Venice (from 1684).  There are also non-Catholic cemeteries in Florence and Bagni di Lucca.

The Cemetery for non-Catholics in Rome dates back to at least 1738 when records show that papal land was dedicated to bury the remains of non-Catholic foreigners, mostly Protestants from northern Europe who could not be buried in consecrated ground in Rome.  The land then and now is adjacent to two ancient monuments – the Pyramid of Caius Cestius dating to approximately 12 B.C. and the Aurelian wall - that form an impressive backdrop for the Cemetery. 

From the middle of the eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth centuries more than four thousand persons were buried at the Cemetery.  Almost one quarter (840) – were North Americans.  The rest were mostly Europeans.

The first person known to have been interred close to the Pyramid, in 1738, was an Oxford graduate, from an aristocratic British family, called George Langton.  His remains, covered by a lead shield, were found in 1928 during excavations.  The first North American (eighteen year-old Ruth McEvers) was buried in 1803 and in the same year Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Humboldt, Prussian minister resident in Rome, buried his nine-year-old son Wilhelm.  Between 1738 and 1822 some sixty people were buried in that area.  Fifteen of these were German and twenty-four English.  The other twenty-one were Scots (two), Irish (five), Swiss (three), Swedish (two), Dutch (one), French (one), North American (three), Polish (two) and Russian (two).

At this time there was no barrier between the burial place and its surroundings.  In 1822 a grant was made of an adjoining area of land which was walled, at the expense of the Roman government.  In 1824 the Vatican gave permission for a protective moat to be dug and in the 1870s, when Rome became the secular capital of a newly unified Italy, the wall that now surrounds the Cemetery was built.  There was an additional grant of land in 1894 – the last – thereby completing the Cemetery’s expansion and giving it the dimensions and scale it occupies today.  A chapel was built in 1898 as well as an ossuary; the names of those buried in this common grave are inscribed on marble tablets on the wall.

In 1910 a formal agreement with the Mayor of Rome, Ernesto Nathan, defined the Cemetery as culturally important and thus to enjoy special protection.  In 1918 it was declared a Zona Monumentale d’Interesse Nazionale.

Although the Cemetery was originally intended for Protestants and those of Orthodox faith, in 1953 the interpretation was broadened to foreigners who were "non-Catholics."  Space had to be provided for Jews, Protestants, and others, with each religion having its own designated area where diverse customs could be practiced. 

The Cemetery population is both exceptionally diverse and exceptionally rich in writers, painters, sculptors, historians, archaeologists, diplomats, scientists, architects and poets, many of international eminence: in addition to the significant number of Protestant and eastern Orthodox graves, other faiths well represented include Islam, Zoroastrianism, Buddhism and Confucianism.  Inscriptions are in more than fifteen languages – Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Church-Slavonic, Japanese, Russian, Greek and Avestic, often engraved in their own non-Roman scripts.