News Culture

Rome's Keats-Shelley House museum and library to close for restoration

By: Wanted in Rome

Date:

07 Nov, 2019

Keats-Shelley House to restore ceilings of museum and library.

The museum and library of the Keats-Shelley House in Rome will close for important restoration work from 8 December to 23 February, reopening to the public on 24 February 2020.

The gift shop and first-floor exhibition area of the Keats-Shelley House will remain open for the duration of the works, with the temporary exhibition John Keats and Virginia Woolf: From Hampstead to Rome accessible to visitors.

Keats-Shelley House says the closure of its museum and library, which contains the apartment where John Keats spent the final 14 weeks and two days of his short life, will allow time for the restoration of the building's historic ceilings.

These ceilings, with their flower motifs painted in wood, were among the very last things that Keats saw, as he reported to his friend Joseph Severn while gazing at the flowers from his bed:

"I shall soon be laid in the quiet grave -- thank God for the quiet grave -- O! I can feel the cold earth upon me -- the daisies growing over me -- O for this quiet -- it will be my first."

The restoration of the ceilings is one of the first major projects associated with the Keats-Shelley200 celebrations, which will commemorate the bicentenaries of the deaths of John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who died within 18 months of one another in Italy two centuries ago.

For more details see the Keats-Shelley House website.