`28th January, 1821: Drawn to keep me awake - a deadly sweat was on him all this night'
The above inscription appears beneath a sketch of the great English romantic poet, John Keats, on his death bed in the house beside the Spanish Steps in Rome where he died of tuberculosis in February 1821, at the age of only 25. The sketch was drawn by the English painter, Joseph Severn, a friend who had accompanied Keats to Rome in the futile hope that the mild Italian climate might do something for his ultimately fatal tuberculosis condition.
This sketch is just one of many fascinating letters, drawings, books and artefacts on display in the Keats-Shelley House, the museum of the English romantics situated in that same, almost totally unchanged house where Keats died.
Although the museum contains a great deal of interesting material about the life and times of both Shelley and Byron, it is inevitably the spirit of Keats that dominates the relatively modest dwelling.
You can sit in the sad little bedroom, right on the corner of the Spanish Steps, where the consumptive Keats died. It is not hard to imagine, either, the concerned landlady wrapping up all his goods and taking them out to the Piazza di Spagna and burning them, as was the custom of the day.
On display is the heartrending testimony of Severn, who nursed Keats through his final days. Having left England in September 1820, Keats actually arrived in Rome nearly two months later after being held up in quarantine in Naples harbour. Although he seemed quite well at first and was able to enjoy the evening passegiata up the Steps and along the Trinita dei Monti, his condition had deteriorated by Christmas. Severn recalls both in word and sketch the anguish of Keats' last days, pointing out that his previous medical studies meant he was all too aware of the inevitability of his forthcoming death: "For his knowledge of internal anatomy enables him to judge of every change accurately and adds largely to his torture," Severn wrote to John Taylor, Keats' publisher.
Founded in 1903, thanks to the enthusiasm of an American poet called Robert Underwood Johnston, helped and encouraged by friends as wide-ranging as the Shelley family, novelist Henry James, philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and US President Theodore Roosevelt (and many others), the Keats-Shelley House must be one of the oldest literary museums of its kind anywhere.
Run on a self-funding basis, the house depends on the turnover generated by the 17,000-18,000 visitors per annum it attracts (33 per cent from Italy, 25 per cent from the UK and 25 per cent from the US). Curator Catherine Payling points out that the Memorial House also earns revenue from the renting of premises adjacent to the museum and, intriguingly for would-be Rome tourists, from the renting of a Landmark Trust Flat, to be found on the third floor of the House.
Given its city centre position, the Keats-Shelley House inevitably generates a sense of calm and peace, sharply at odds with the noise and bustle of modern Rome just beyond the window pane. For this and for its sad but strangely uplifting atmosphere, it more than merits a visit.