An obscure map in the Keats-Shelley House inspires a cultural pilgrimage to places in Rome where American, British and Irish writers and artists stayed in the 19th century.

Rome's Keats-Shelley House hosts a mysterious watercolour map on its steep, narrow stairwell where it is believed to have rested since the museum's opening in 1909.

Painted by an unknown artist, the map depicts the area surrounding Piazza di Spagna, using blue motifs with calligraphy to indicate where visiting British and American writers and artists stayed during the 19th century. By this time the network of streets around the Spanish Steps was already known as the “English ghetto" due to its popularity among wealthy British travellers who would conclude their grand tours of Europe in Rome.

The map contains around two dozen names – many of whose paths crossed – with several buildings hosting plaques boasting of their illustrious former residents. Based on the information recorded in the map, which can also be viewed on the Keats-Shelley House website, it is possible to trace a roughly clockwise trail around the Tridente, a trident-shaped area of the centro storico fanning out from Porta del Popolo, once the main gateway to the city. The walking tour spans nine decades, from 1817 to 1895, and takes a couple of hours at a leisurely pace. 

Unsurprisingly, the map takes as its central focus the Keats-Shelley House at Piazza di Spagna 26, whose former tenant John Keats (1795-1821) needs little introduction. Despite spending just three months here, a virtual prisoner to the final throes of tuberculosis, Keats remains indelibly associated with Rome.

Visitors today can enter the second-floor bedroom in which the 25-year-old Romantic poet died in terrible agony, his devoted friend Joseph Severn at his side, on 23 February 1821. Keats is buried in the city's Non-Catholic Cemetery where his tomb – dedicated simply to a “young English poet” – continues to draw pilgrims almost two centuries after his death. 

1819 saw the arrival of English Romantic painter J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851). It is not known where he stayed – perhaps at Palazzo Poli near the Trevi Fountain from which his one surviving letter was written. However we know that on his return trip in August 1828 he took lodgings at Piazza Mignanelli 12, a stone's throw from what is now the Keats-Shelley House.

Turner's exhibition in December 1828 at Palazzo Trulli (demolished half a century later to make way for Corso Vittorio Emanuele II) was attended by over a thousand visitors; however, the works received a predominantly unfavourable response, according to Turner expert David Blayney Brown. On 3 January 1829 Turner departed Rome for the last time, although the city's ruins were to feature prominently in his future work.

"Oh Rome! my country! city of the soul!” The Romantic poet Lord Byron (1788-1824) is undoubtedly the most colourful character on this list. Fleeing debts and a desperate personal situation, Byron left England in 1816, never to return, living mainly in Italy until his death in modern-day Greece aged 36.

Byron befriended the Shelleys at Lake Geneva before travelling to Italy, where he was to spend seven years, predominantly in Venice, Pisa and Ravenna. According to popular myth he lodged at Piazza di Spagna 66, opposite the Keats-Shelley House, in 1817. On his return to Ravenna he wrote the fourth canto of his epic narrative poem Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, about half of which relates to Rome. 

The map features a couple of names who fit into neither painter nor writer category. One of these figures is James Clark (1788-1870), a Scottish doctor who operated a thriving medical practice in Piazza di Spagna from 1819 until 1826, during which time poor Keats was one of his patients. Despite rising to become physician to Queen Victoria, recent research suggests that Clark misdiagnosed Keats' illness, compounding the poet's final months of agony by enforcing starvation and blood lettings.

The doctor's exact address is unknown but, according to the American author John Evangelist Walsh in his book In Darkling I Listen. The Last Days and Death of John Keats, Clark lived "across the steps" from the Keats-Shelley House. 

Ascending the steps to Trinità dei Monti, the map lists the American landscape painter Thomas Cole (1801-48) as living on Via Sistina, without a street number but with the vital clue that he was based at a studio once used by Claude Lorrain, from 1831-32 and again in 1841.

According to a drawing in the collection of the British Museum the location of Lorrain's former studio corresponds to Via Sistina 66, the building wedged between the start of Via Sistina and Via Gregoriana, opposite today's Hotel Hassler. 

Next door at Via Sistina 64 lived the Irish portrait painter Amelia Curran (1775-1847), who moved to Rome in or around 1818, eking out a living painting portraits and copying old Masters. She is best known for her portrait of her friend Percy Bysshe Shelley, quill in hand, which was presumably painted at this address and is now in the National Portrait Gallery in London. Curran died in 1847, her funeral celebrated at the Franciscan church of St Isidore's on Via degli Artisti 41. Here she is commemorated with a memorial featuring palette and brushes, carved by prominent Rome-based Irish sculptor John Hogan (1800-58).

On 7 May 1819, Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) and his wife Mary Shelley (1797-1851), fresh from penning her Gothic masterpiece Frankenstein, left their lodgings at Palazzo Verospi on Via del Corso 374 to move next door to Curran on Via Sistina 65, against the wishes of the family doctor, who advised Shelley to escape the city's “mal'aria”.

Although the elevated Via Sistina had the “best air in Rome” according to Shelley, one month after their move the Shelley's three-year-old son William “Willmouse” died of a fever, most likely malaria. The heartbroken couple left Rome for the last time on 10 June 1819, after burying the boy, their third child to die, at the Non-Catholic Cemetery. Three and a half years later Shelley's ashes would be interred in the same cemetery after his tragic death aged 29 during a storm off the Tuscan coast near Lerici.

Veering slightly off-course now, turn left half-way down Via Sistina onto Via di Porta Pinciana. At the top of the street Palazzo Laranzani, number 37, hosted Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-64) in 1858. Hawthorne overcame his initial misgivings of Rome's “wicked filth” to become enraptured with the city; his 1858 Gothic romance The Marble Faun was inspired after seeing a woodland scene of mythological sculpture in Villa Borghese. Hawthorne was affected profoundly by the tragic tale of Roman noblewoman Beatrice Cenci – who also inspired Shelley's five-act drama The Cenci – and her portrait attributed to Guido Reni, which can be seen today at Palazzo Barberini. 

Turning back downhill towards Via Sistina, take the last left onto Via degli Artisti. From 1821 until 1824, when the street was still called Via di S. Isidoro, it hosted the English painter Joseph Severn (1793-1879) who lived in a large apartment at number 18, today the Hotel degli Artisti. Severn is linked eternally with Keats with whom he travelled to Rome in 1820 and whom he nursed devotedly in his dying days.

Severn would outlive Keats by almost six decades, becoming an accomplished painter and a highly respected figure among Rome's English-speaking community. In 1841 Severn moved back to England; however, 20 years later he returned to Rome as British Consul, a post he held for 11 years. When he died, aged 81, there was outrage that his resting place at the Non-Catholic Cemetery was not next to Keats. Several years later, Severn was reinterred beside his old friend.