By Constance C.E. Duncan Catholic News Service

ROME  -- Just a few steps away from Rome's traffic jams, blaring sirens and sticky heat, the city's Non-Catholic Cemetery is a garden of breezes and greenery, of crickets, birdsong, roses and pomegranate trees.

Not surprisingly, it is also a magnet for visitors. There are students reading under trees by the graves of John Keats and Percy Shelley; young mothers pushing babies down shady paths flanked by graceful statues; and an older crowd milling around the little chapel which, like the cemetery, is still in use.

Amanda Thursfield, director of the cemetery, calls these people the "regulars" -- local Italians who come to find a break from Rome's chaos.

"A cemetery is not just a place for dead people; it needs to be kept alive," she said.

That concept is a familiar one to people from North America and traditionally Protestant regions of Europe.

"Anglo-Saxons and Northern Europeans are more used to living alongside their cemeteries," said Thursfield, an Englishwoman who previously worked for the British Council, the government-sponsored cultural and educational organization. "You walk through the church (grave)yards to get to places, even at night. ... We have a much closer relationship with our cemeteries, with our dead."

In Italy, she said, ever since Napoleon's decree that graveyards should be built up outside cities and locked up at night for hygienic reasons, cemeteries have been generally regarded as "dark, unhealthy places."

Thursfield said a burial ground can be a "place of contemplation, a spiritual place which can actually elevate you, and so it's a place where you can go to sort of spiritually clean yourself, purify yourself ... an antidote to the troubling aspects of the modern world."

For that reason, Thursfield said, she and her staff try to keep the atmosphere as informal and relaxing as possible: "Nobody stops you sitting on a bench or moving the bench around."

This welcoming oasis actually traces its origins to a history of separation and exclusion.

Because the papacy considered Rome to be hallowed ground, non-Catholic foreigners were long buried in common graves outside the city walls.

But in the 18th century, when "important foreigners started to arrive in the city, it was a bit embarrassing to bury them alongside prostitutes and criminals," so a more respectable solution had to be found, Thursfield explained.

The cemetery dates back to at least 1716, when records show that Pope Clement XI permitted members of the Stuart Court in exile from England to be buried in front of the huge ancient Roman pyramid tomb of Caius Cestius.

"Cestius was of course himself a pagan, (so) if we want to look at it that way, he was the head gravestone in that field," Thursfield said.

As a dignified and beautiful resting place for non-Catholic foreigners that also respected Catholic sensibilities, the cemetery was thus a practical solution to what could have been a "delicate political problem," she said.

In the 1950s, the somewhat more accurate name "Non-Catholic Cemetery" was chosen to reflect the range of faiths represented here -- which actually includes Catholicism, since first-degree relations of non-Catholics can claim a place next to their loved ones.

Many assume that Antonio Gramsci, founder of the Italian Communist Party and a prisoner of the fascist dictatorship, was buried in the cemetery because of his status as a kind of spiritual outsider in his own land. In fact, his body lies here because his Russian wife's Orthodox family already had a tomb in the cemetery.

The various styles of the graves and the different languages engraved on them point to the universality of death.

"Every foreigner also brings, and brought, a little piece of his or her homeland," Thursfield said, noting for example the numerous Orthodox crosses with three horizontal crossbeams. "There's a little bit of so many nations in here."

And since the cemetery began opening to the public on a regular basis a decade ago, she said, it has found another way to serve "as a gravitational force that brings Catholics and non-Catholics together."