According to Harry Nelson Gay in the Keats Shelley Memorial Bulletin II, 1913 – The Protestant Burial-Ground in Rome: A Historical Sketch, as early as 1816 some guide-books had called the attention of travellers to the spot (Vasi, Itinerario Istruttivo di Roma, Rome 1816).  In 1818 Shelley described it in a letter to Thomas Love Peacock as “the most beautiful and solemn Cemetery” he had ever beheld.  In the preface to his elegy on Keats, Adonais (1821), Shelley writes: “The Cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies.  It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.”

After Keats’s death in Rome, the Cemetery almost at once became a place of international pilgrimage.  The American N.P. Willis, visiting it in 1833, could truthfully say: “Every reader knows his history and the cause of his death […] Keats was no doubt a poet of very uncommon promise.”  From a very early date it was American devotion and generosity that ensured the upkeep of the grave.  There were many European pilgrims also – in 1838 Auguste Barbier wrote: “[…] the grave which interested me most and held me near it longest was that of the unfortunate John Keats, author of Endymion, the English poet who, in modern times […] had the finest and tenderest feeling for the beauty of antiquity.”

When Oscar Wilde came to Rome in 1877, he visited Keats’s grave on the same day that he had been granted an audience with Pope Pius IX.  Prostrating himself on the grass in front of it for half an hour, he declared it “the holiest place in Rome,” and was inspired to write sonnets on the graves of both Keats and Shelley.  Thomas Hardy, visiting Keats’s grave ten years later, was moved to write a poem on the Pyramid of Cestius and the nearby graves where “two immortal shades abide.”

Gabriele D’Annunzio describes the Cemetery in his novel Il Piacere (1889): “Into the sky rose the perpendicular lines of the cypresses, all but motionless, their tips alone quivering in the sun’s last rays.  Between the smooth straight trunks with their greenish hue like Tibur stone appeared the white tombs and the square slabs, the broken columns, the vaults, the urns [...]  That unbroken symmetry of tree-shapes, that unadorned whiteness of monumental masonry brought a sense of deep and restful peace into the mind.”  And, further on,

“Now an evening breeze was getting up and the sky behind the hill was crossed with glowing bars [...] Erect against a field of light the cypress-ranks grew in grandeur and mystery, pierced through and through with shafts of light, their tips all quivering. The statue of Psyche at the end of the central pathway had taken on a pale flesh-like tint.”  At that time, Psyche Divesting Herself of Mortality, to give the statue her exact title had only recently been placed at the top of the central avenue of the Cemetery, just under the walls.  She was the creation of Richard Saltonstall Greenough (1819-1904), and it seems probable that D’Annunzio had made his acquaintance and wanted to record his Psyche as something new and worthy of note.

In his Italian Hours, published in 1909, Henry James described the Cemetery as “a mixture of tears and smiles, of stones and flowers, of mourning cypresses and radiant sky, which gives us the impression of looking back at death from the brighter side of the grave.”  In his short novel Daisy Miller James describes the funeral of the young American woman:  “Daisy’s grave was in the little Protestant Cemetery, in an angle of the wall of imperial Rome, beneath the cypresses and the thick spring flowers.”  Life imitated art in the subsequent death and funeral (in Testaccio) of James’s dear friend, the writer Constance Fenimore Woolson (1840-1894), who took her own life in Venice and is buried in the place described precisely by James as the tomb of Daisy Miller: under the wall, near the tomb of the son of Goethe.