Centenary Appeal

Keats-Shelley

Memorial Association Patron HRH The Prince of Wales

Registered Charity No: 212692

CENTENARY APPEAL

A message from the Chair of KSMA, Harriet Cullen:

The Association is unusual in that it combines several things. We are a literary society which commemorates two of the greatest poets of our language. We celebrate the special circumstances of these and other English and American writers who, variously, lived, wrote, or died in Italy. We were founded with the support of three nations, Britain, the United States and Italy. And we also have bricks and mortar. We are the custodians of what is nowadays called a "museum house", in the heart of historic Rome: a house with an eventful and precarious history which has been saved twice in the last century.

At the time of Keats’s death in 1821 in Piazza di Spagna 26, his walls were scraped and all his rented furniture was burnt to guard against infection. The lodging house became to an extent a place of pilgrimage for admirers of Keats. It was occupied throughout the nineteenth century by a succession of artistically minded foreigners, notably towards the end by the colourful Swedish physician Axel Munthe.

Not long after his departure, it was threatened with conversion into a large hotel. It was then, in 1903, that the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association was formed to buy the House and to set it up as a poets’ memorial, uniting the Anglo-American community in Rome, and enlisting the personal support of the King of Italy. There followed six years of “passing the hat” in England and the United States, protracted negotiations to purchase, and conversion of the second floor interiors, in the words of the American poet Robert Underwood Johnson, to “a delightful library of three rooms lined with dark wood, and, overlooking the piazza, the simple, tiny bedroom in which Keats died”.

The Keats-Shelley Memorial House, as it was then called, opened its doors to a trickle of visitors in April 1909.

For the next thirty years the House prospered, until the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1941, when the Germans occupied Rome, it closed and virtually went into hiding, with all name plaques on the Piazza removed, the Library within still in place, but with the most precious treasures removed in a metal chest to the Abbey of Montecassino, considered ‘one of the safest places in Italy’. How they were retrieved makes an exciting story for which there is no space here [The House in War-time, by its indomitable curator, Vera Cacciatore, Keats-Shelley Bulletin 1950]

On the night of June 4th 1944, New York correspondent A.C. Sedgwick entered Rome with the American Fifth Army. He had known the Keats-Shelley House since childhood, and instinct led him back to it. Climbing the marble stairs with his British comrade, Captain Mason, he found it open: ‘There was quiet, peace, a pause in our lives in which to think, reflect, and be thankful that such a haven had been spared, it would appear, by a miracle.’

The present-day custodians of the House have a lot to be thankful for. But as we marked the century of its opening, this April, 2009, we decided to look forward and to provide for the changing needs of the House in its next hundred years. For this reason we have launched a Centenary Appeal, described in more detail by the Curator on the page “The House in Rome”. We have already raised £93,000 towards our target of £237,000, for improvements.

If you would like to donate to the Appeal, click here to print out a donations form. For UK donors, this contains information on how to increase your donation by Gift Aid.

For US donors, a tax-deductible way of giving for a specific aspect of the Appeal has been arranged by our sister organisation, the Keats-Shelley Association of America. If you wish to donate towards the new exhibitions area, (see Curator’s message) write a cheque made out to the KSAA and send it to: KSAA, Room 226, The New York Public Library, 476 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10018-2788, stipulating that it is for the “Exhibition Expansion, Keats-Shelley House Rome.”

Harriet Cullen