A few days at our son's attic apartment in Rome — waking each morning to this view of the pyramid tomb of Gaius Cestius, a Roman magistrate, built between 18 and 12 BC, as well as surviving sections of Rome's ancient walls.

The remains of poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley and philosopher-writer Antonio Gramsci are interred in the park-like non-Catholic cemetery, alongside the pyramid.