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.
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).
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. |
The
Cemetery
for non-Catholics
in
Rome dates back
to at least 1732
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. 
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.