Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

Ashes - Cimitero acattolico, Rome

Heart - St Peter's Church,
 Bournemouth

Death: 8th July 1822
Location: Ashes - Cimitero acattolico / Protestant Cemetery, Rome, Lazio, Italy. Heart - St Peter's Church, Bournemouth, Dorset, England
Cause of death: Accidental - drowning
Photos taken by: DeadGoodBooks
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Major English Romantic poet who is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. A radical in his poetry as well as his political and social views, Shelley did not achieve fame during his lifetime, but recognition for his poetry grew steadily following his death. Shelley was a key member of a close circle of visionary poets and writers that included Lord Byron; Leigh Hunt; Thomas Love Peacock; and his own second wife, Mary Shelley.

On 8 July 1822, less than a month before his 30th birthday, Shelley drowned in a sudden storm while sailing in his schooner, Don Juan, in the Gulf of Spezzia, Italy. Shelley's body washed ashore and later, in keeping with quarantine regulations, was cremated on the beach near Viareggio. After Shelley's body had been burning for several hours it was discovered that his heart remained intact and it was removed from the pyre by Edward Trelawny and sent to Mary Shelley.

The rest of Shelley's ashes were interred in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome. His grave has the Latin inscription, Cor Cordium (Heart of Hearts), and, in reference to his death at sea, a few lines of Ariel's Song from Shakespeare's The Tempest:

Nothing of him that doth fade

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Shelley's current grave site is the second that he has had in the cemetery. Some weeks after Shelley had been laid to rest Edward Trelawny came to Rome and had not liked his friend's position among a number of other graves so he purchased, what seemed to him, a better plot near the old wall. The ashes were exhumed and moved to their present location. Trelawny had purchased the adjacent plot, and over sixty years later his remains were placed there.

After the death of Mary Shelley a copy of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem Adonaïs was found among her possessions The book had one page folded round a silk parcel containing the remains of his heart; these remains were interred in the grave of Mary Shelley at St Peter's Church, Bournemouth.