This Europe: Graveyard recyclers target the resting place of Keats

Bodies are missing from the graveyard in Rome where for centuries expatriates such as the poets Keats and Shelley have been buried.

Relatives trying to trace ancestors have found their graves replaced with shiny new ones. Families claim they have not been notified, there are no records of where bodies have been moved to, and gravestones lie, often damaged, in ditches.

The British School at Rome is surveying the graveyard and estimates that as many as one in 10 graves has gone since 1985. The graveyard, established in Testaccio in the mid-18th century, is specifically for "non-Catholic foreigners", since by tradition they cannot be buried on consecrated ground. Jews, Orthodox Russians, Germans, Americans, Britons and French people are among those buried there.

A stroll around the graveyard reveals not only the final resting places of Shelley and Keats, but also of Goethe's son, the Italian communist leader Gramsci, the Bulgari family, the author R M Ballantyne and architects, ambassadors and clergy.

The high price of grave space in Rome has made the sale and upkeep of plots a lucrative business. When the biggest public cemetery at Campo Verano was full, the management started recycling graves, digging up remains and reselling the plots of land.

This is common in Catholic graveyards, where plots tend to be leased for periods as short as 10 years. But there has been concern about which graves have been removed, and where the bodies have gone. Ronald Loudon, the Dutch ambassador and the chairman of the general committee that oversees the non-Catholic graveyard, says: "The problem is trying to withstand the pressure of Catholic Italians who want to be buried in the cemetery because there are so many celebrities there ... I have said no. I am trying to protect a beautiful monumental site." He said all new graves had to be sanctioned by him.

Shelley wrote of the graveyard: "The cemetery is an open space among the ruins, covered in winter with violets and daisies. It might make one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place." But the graveyard he knew may not exist much longer.