The house where Keats spent the last four months of his life is now a museum. This is the view from the bedroom where he died, overlooking the Spanish steps.
There were only a few other visitors, and the contrast between the hushed reverence of the paintings and letters and first editions in the dim rooms and the life, teeming and bright and raucous, outside was heartbreaking. I was never all that fond of the Romantics, but I can still recite most of Ode to a Nightingale by heart. (Not, of course, if anyone's looking.)
Keats knew that he was a great poet and he also knew that he would die, at 25, with most of that poetry unwritten. He lay in this room listening to the fountain, the horses, the laughter of passersby, so much life on the other side of those windows.
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