Ode to a Roman Reunion

When I announced to my nearest and dearest late in 2024 that my three sisters and I were planning a week-long reunion in Rome — without spouses or offspring — my ten-year-old grandson, a cherubic but sharp-eared listener, demanded to know, with all the umbrage of a younger sibling, “Am I an offspring?”

I had never considered that an offspring could be a rogue branch on a family tree, so I gave him a reassuring hug. “Yes, you are,” I explained, “but this is a special trip for your great-aunts and me to hang out together before too much time passes.” I imagined him thinking, “You mean before you get too old and decrepit,” referring to a line I had used years earlier to avoid tottering across a raised plank in a local park behind his older sisters.

“Will you still be speaking by the end?” a friend inquired when I told her about the plan. “Why do you think we are going for one week and not two?” I retorted, because the same thought had occurred to me. My sisters and I have been through the heartache wringer over the decades, but while we have had disagreements about many things, from real estate to religion, and have jostled for position in the sibling rivalry stakes, we have never been estranged or stopped talking. On the contrary: a habit of rehashing events, decoding behaviours, and analyzing motivations has been driving the narrative of our relationships for more than half a century. That’s not to say stony silence couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be the group souvenir we all carried home, but there would be less chance of that, I persuaded myself, without the distraction of spouses and children, let alone all the food prep and cleanup that comes with hosting guests — even family members — in one’s home.

Why Rome: that was the essential question, considering that 2025 was a jubilee year, a time of pilgrimage. The first was declared by the Catholic Church in the year 1300, and they’ve been celebrated at regular intervals ever since. We knew there were going to be larger crowds than usual around the Vatican, but a bigger concern was the waning of our own metabolic clocks.

Weddings and, increasingly, funerals are the impetus for most family gatherings these days. If not now, the year before the eldest of us celebrated four score years, then when? All of us had friends who had died or been diagnosed with mobility issues, cognitive impairments, or heart conditions. We didn’t want to meet as survivors at a funeral mourning the death of one of us.

In fact, the idea of a reunion had begun the previous summer on Prince Edward Island, at a celebration of life for a beloved cousin, who had died, aged ninety-two, after a lifetime of gentle kindnesses and open-armed welcomes to travellers from near and far. I had invited my sisters — les quatre soeurs, as we call ourselves on our WhatsApp chat group — to join me at the cottage that had once belonged to a favourite aunt on the Island. Three of us — the Canadian ones — signed on quickly. Not our English sister, so called because a trip to study midwifery in 1971 had turned into a life changer after she met the man who became her husband and the father of their three children. She had another commitment closer to home. If she couldn’t come to us, could we meet up with her in a place we all wanted to visit and where none of us would be on kitchen duty?

Rome, we concluded, was still where all roads led, especially since our eldest sister (Number One) is a devout Catholic and our youngest (Number Four) spent a year studying Italian in Perugia BC (Before Children) and had recently re-enrolled in language classes. Although she denies it, she is almost fluent. Number Three once worked as a planner in real estate development and is fascinated by the architecture in Rome, especially the 1,901-year-old Pantheon, with what’s still the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world. For my part (as Number Two), I was on a John Keats kick. Happily, that aligned with Number Four’s desire to revisit the Non-Catholic Cemetery — also known as the Protestant or English Cemetery — where the poet is buried.

I had been to Rome a couple of years earlier with my husband and had obsessed on Caravaggio, the brilliant Italian painter who had been forced to flee to Malta in 1607, after killing another man in a brawl. We had spent so many days in museums and churches staring at Caravaggio’s darkly dramatic religious scenes that we had run out of time to take in the house where Keats had died of tuberculosis in 1821, at the age of twenty-five. That was an oversight I was determined to correct. I had been rereading his poetry, which I had loved as a student but had neglected in recent years in the flurry of work and domestic responsibilities.

A marvellous writer, although unheralded in his lifetime, a tempestuous personality prone to bodily vices, yet a devoted brother, caring for siblings dying of wickedly infectious tuberculosis, he seemed the perfect literary subtext for a Roman holiday with my sisters, especially after I had come across “Romantic Poet” by Diane Seuss, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 2022 and the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 2021:

Through a friend of a friend, I had found a large apartment with three bedrooms, a communal terrace full of planters growing herbs and vines, and a table where we could gather to eat, talk, read, doze, and watch the sun rise or set over a synagogue in one direction and a church in another. The weather was perfect when we arrived: warm but not hot, sunny but not glaring. We seemed to be on our best (for us) behaviour. We respected one another’s foibles, welcoming every morning like a new beginning, avoiding difficult topics as we drank our coffee, chomped on granola and fruit, and planned the day. We met slights, intended or otherwise, with silence rather than snark, forgoing the way one might snap at a husband who had forgotten, once again, to empty the dishwasher. Unlike marital wrangling over chores, this trip was a milestone. We were like colleagues meeting to celebrate the anniversary of a successful but hard-won campaign: Growing Up.

For the first time in decades, I found myself sharing not only a bedroom but a bed with my older sister, something we hadn’t done since we were small children. I expect we were both anxious at the prospect, but neither of us snored or clutched one end of the duvet and rolled over, leaving the other shivering. True, she read her prayer book both at night and in the morning, while I indulged my Wordle habit, searched news bulletins and social media, responded to texts and email, dipped into online biographies of Keats, and revisited his poems, especially “Ode to a Nightingale.”

Once again, I was particularly struck by Keats’s yearning for the small thrush’s freedom and his mourning the death of his brother Tom from tuberculosis:

Sometimes in my sleep, I relived (not always silently) early shames, like the time when I was probably four and desperately needed to pee. I remember waking up, tiptoeing out of the bedroom that I shared with my older sister, walking down the hall to the bathroom, crossing the green tiled floor with increasing urgency, and feeling the expansive relief of emptying my bladder after I had finally pulled down my pyjamas and sat on the toilet. Suddenly I felt warm and wet, and my sister was yelling, “Get out, get out!” In shock, I realized that what I had thought was real was a dream; in fact, I had cuddled up against my sister’s sleeping body and unleashed my pent-up urine against her lower back. She was livid, I was mortified, and our poor mother had to get up and change the sheets. Was I pissing on my sister in defiance of her rightful seniority or seeking her protection as the needy junior? I think the latter, but who can say for certain. Mercifully, she doesn’t remember the indignity, intentional or not.

Our apartment, on a tiny piazza, was close to archeological treasures, the Tiber River, and the charm of Trastevere, and within walking distance of the Pantheon, the Trevi Fountain, the Vatican, and the Galleria Borghese. Having learned the importance of booking ahead on my previous stay in the Eternal City, I made sure we bought tickets months in advance for both the Vatican and the Borghese. Imagine: six Caravaggios in one room, plus many exquisite Gian Lorenzo Bernini sculptures throughout the museum, including Apollo and Daphne, a grimacing David, and The Rape of Persephone, which he carved when he was only twenty-three. Oh, my wasted youth. I would be strolling among those masterpieces yet if our tickets hadn’t expired after two hours.

When we got to St. Peter’s Basilica and the Apostolic Palace, I was glad I had visited them with my husband. He and I had had time and space to contemplate Michelangelo’s Pietà, perhaps the greatest depiction of maternal grief that I have ever witnessed, and then to immerse ourselves in the narratives on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, without being jostled and interrupted by chatty tourists. This time, even though we had tickets, the crowds were so thick that it felt as though we were queuing for nosebleed seats at the final Blue Jays home game, convinced that our presence would ensure their success in the World Series. After finally being admitted to the Vatican Museums, we worked our way through the astounding collections, from Egyptian mummies to contemporary art (noting the absence of soon-to-be-repatriated Indigenous artifacts), until we ended up elbowing for space in the place where we most wanted to be, so we could contemplate Michelangelo’s interpretation of Genesis. It was like craning your neck at the stage from the mosh pit of a sold-out rock concert.

Our biggest problem was a shared incompetence: none of us has a decent sense of direction. Mine is probably the worst: a combination of daydreaming while marching resolutely ahead and then turning left as a default move. Also, in trying to keep costs down, I had suggested we didn’t need to invest in SIM cards for our phones as we had excellent Wi‑Fi in the apartment, three or four guidebooks among us, and a variety of street maps. What could go wrong? After all, my husband and I had recently spent a month in Paris without a data plan. (Of course, we’d had internet in our rented apartment, and the French capital is a planned city, thanks to Baron Haussmann’s nineteenth-century renovations, and it has an extensive subway system with lots of maps and attendants who can point you in the correct direction.)

Rome is an ancient place, with thousands of tiny streets, a wandering river, and a limited rapid transit system. The four of us clocked zillions of steps trying to find obvious landmarks like the Trevi Fountain. Number Three would stare at a map of Roman highlights, pointing to the Pantheon, say, one of her top hits, while Number Four would peer at a detailed street plan and say, “This is where we are,” which typically turned out to be in the gutter between two pages of a book. How to get from one attraction to another was a diabolical mystery.

Number One, who probably has the most intuitive sense of direction, would look around and remark, “I remember going down that street last night, or was it the night before. . . .” I, shamefaced about my lousy advice about cellphones, accosted tourists who were as lost as we were or locals whose English was as rudimentary as my Italian. Why didn’t we chip in and buy a SIM card? Good question. And, yes, that is one of the first things my husband asked after my return to Toronto.

So the four of us stuck together, as though we were on a school outing. Nobody went anywhere alone; even walks to the shop around the corner to buy wine, bread, and Gorgonzola were two-person expeditions. On Sunday, we didn’t want to risk Number One being late for mass, so we climbed into a cab, only to be rerouted and eventually dumped by the driver, with apologies, because traffic had been diverted to accommodate a marathon.

Yet, invariably, we found what we were seeking, including the Keats-Shelley House, named after the two writers who died a year apart in Italy. The building, which is in the Piazza di Spagna, adjacent to the Spanish Steps, had been threatened with demolition in 1903, until a group of English and American diplomats and writers clubbed together to rescue it. Six years later, after an international fundraising campaign, it opened, as a museum, library, and shrine to John Keats and Percy Shelley and the other Romantic poets with links to Rome.

The house, which has the hush of a reading room, had a special Keats exhibit when we were there, including portraits of the poet and his siblings made by a friend, the artist Joseph Severn. After entering the second-floor room where Keats had died, I walked out on the balcony, saw the view of Pietro Bernini’s leaky-boat-shaped Fontana della Barcaccia, watched both the sure-footed and the stumbling pedestrians climbing at their differing paces to the church of Trinità dei Monti, and imagined how Keats might have found some ease in this quiet place, listening not to the song of the nightingale but to the pealing of church bells, as his life ebbed away from bacterial infection.

Keats was a strange combination of poet and apothecary. The eldest of four surviving children, he was born in Moorgate, London, probably on Halloween 1795, although his precise birthdate and location are up for some debate. His parents believed in educating their boys, but they couldn’t afford either Eton or Harrow. Instead, they sent him to John Clarke’s school in Enfield, a good choice as it was close to Keats’s more prosperous maternal grandparents’ house and the curriculum was progressive. Charles Cowden Clarke, the headmaster’s son, became a mentor and a friend who turned him on to Renaissance literature, including Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and George Chapman’s translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, which would later inspire one of Keats’s most famous poems, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.”

Tragedy had intervened when Keats was eight, with the death of his father, who had mysteriously fallen from his horse and fatally fractured his skull while returning from visiting John and his younger brother George at school. Six years later, Keats’s mother died of tuberculosis, and he and his siblings went to live with their maternal grandmother. He left school at fourteen, was apprenticed for three years to a neighbour who was a surgeon and an apothecary, and then enrolled as a medical student at Guy’s Hospital in London.

He had an aptitude for medicine, which would have given him greater professional and financial stability, but he longed to be a writer and published his first sonnet, “O Solitude!,” in 1816, quickly followed by Poems, a collection that attracted so little notice that his boyhood friend Clarke said, “The book might have emerged in Timbuctoo.”

Despite his lack of acclaim, Keats had several ardent fans within the writing community who promoted his work, including “Endymion,” a long poem about the shepherd beloved by Cynthia, the Greek moon goddess. It begins with the famous line “A thing of beauty is a joy for ever.” Nevertheless, it was published to less than thunderous applause by Taylor and Hessey in 1818. The critic John Gibson Lockhart dismissed it as “imperturbable drivelling idiocy” in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine. Meanwhile, Keats was crafting the shorter poems that would ensure his legacy, including “Ode to a Nightingale” and “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” while expending his filial compassion and his medical training in nursing his youngest brother, Tom, who died early in December 1818. Their brother George, who had emigrated to the United States with his wife, would also die from the lung disease. Keats’s only sister, Frances, eight years his junior, escaped the family scourge and lived to eighty-six, having preserved her brother’s letters as a sacred trust.

The poet-apothecary realized what was up in early February 1820, when he suffered two hemorrhages. “I know the colour of that blood. It is arterial blood,” he declared to his friend Charles Armitage Brown. “That drop of blood is my death warrant.” Nevertheless, he agreed to his doctor’s suggestion that he travel to Rome, a warmer location than damp London. Accompanied by Severn, he arrived in the middle of chilly November and moved into the house that now bears his name.

In his last letter, written on November 30, Keats complained of his ill health and said he felt that, his “real life having passed,” he was “leading a posthumous existence.” He begged desperately for opium to quell his death throes, the same drug he had given to his younger brother two years earlier. Severn refused to comply, in a well-meaning but misguided effort to prolong his friend’s life. Indeed, he was so afraid of administering the opium Keats craved that he handed it over to James Clark, a British doctor practising in Rome. Consequently, the poet was put on a starvation diet, restricted to a daily meal of an anchovy on a solitary piece of bread, bled frequently (a standard treatment at the time), and denied any form of palliation. He died a protracted and painful death on February 23, 1821.

Everything in Keats’s chamber, including his bed and curtains, was burned for fear of spreading infection, so all the furnishings in the house now, except the fireplace, are period replacements. He was buried, along with unopened letters from his great love, Fanny Brawne, and letters from his surviving sister, Fanny Keats, in the private Non-Catholic Cemetery, in the Testaccio neighbourhood, behind the thirty-seven-metre-high Pyramid of Cestius, the tomb of a Roman magistrate.

The cemetery, which is in the historic centre of Rome, designated by UNESCO as a World Heritage site in 1980, was the last stop for les quatre soeurs. Having checked our pocketbooks and our guidebooks, we splurged on a taxi. Is excessive penny-pinching a sign of age? I wondered, before relaxing into the comfort of being driven to our destination by somebody who knew where he was going.

Smaller than Père-Lachaise in Paris, the walled cemetery has myriad paths among pine and cypress trees, rose bushes, sculptures, seasonal flowering vines including wisteria, and verdant patches covering the graves of travellers and non-Catholics who have died in Rome over the past 300 years. As we walked through the entrance gate, Number Four recalled counting thirty feral cats skulking around the grounds on her previous visit, a macabre image that was displaced by the presence of many fewer felines this time, all of them well tended and friendly.

Keats’s grave is in a quiet corner near an outside wall. As he was dying, he sent Severn to scout the cemetery and was pleased by the description of his designated plot, “with its violets, daisies and anemones sown among the grass,” as the archeologist Nicholas Stanley-Price has written. These are the “light of laughing flowers” that Shelley would mention in Adonais, his elegy for Keats.

However much Keats liked the prospect of his final resting place, he resented his lack of recognition in the literary world so bitterly that he dictated an acrid inscription to Severn: “Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water.”

Severn added the following: “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 Tomb Stone.” Such bitterness is not the ease with which one should approach death.

Keats died far too young, without the plaudits that were his due and without achieving what could have become an even richer legacy. Indeed, in John Keats: A New Life, from 2012, Nicholas Roe remarks on Keats’s dramatic ability to recreate vivid childhood scenes in letters and poems and suggests that, given time, he might have developed into a novelist to rival Charles Dickens or Thomas Hardy. If only he had known about the writers — including Shelley, Oscar Wilde, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, among many others — who have symbolically, at least, prostrated themselves on his grave. Severn, who outlived Keats by almost sixty years, grew to regret the inscription he’d had engraved on the poet’s tombstone. After his own death, he was buried next to his friend.

As I stood there, honouring Keats and despairing of the lack of life-saving antibiotics in his era, I couldn’t help but lament the way he had died, without family to comfort him in his suffering. Looking around the beautiful cemetery with so many gravestones commemorating strangers, I could spot my sisters as they wandered among the markers, and I was glad that we would soon come together and head back to our rented apartment for one more evening on the terrace reminiscing about our own family lore.

I’m hoping for more of these reunions, as I am not planning on dying any time soon. But after paying homage at Keats’s grave in a beautiful cemetery that seems short on space, I have determined that finding a final resting place for my ashes, other than a jar on somebody’s dresser or a package in the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet, is a high priority — right after I learn how to purchase SIM cards abroad.