THE English Cemetery in Rome, resting place of the Romantic poets John Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley, has been listed as one of the most endangered sites on Earth by the World Monuments Fund. Catherine Payling, director of the Keats-Shelley House at the Spanish Steps in Rome, said that the graveyard, properly known as the Non-Catholic or Protestant cemetery, had not been adequately maintained for decades. "There are a large number of crumbling gravestones in a state of deterioration," she said. Ms Payling, who is treasurer of the international volunteer committee supervising the cemetery, said that an action plan had been drawn up to save the site, which is now on the fund's "watch list" of 100 endangered monuments. A team of conservationists, fundraisers and horticulturalists was looking into urgent measures to restore the overgrown cemetery, she said. The graveyard is a small haven of English greenery and tranquillity, lined with cypress trees, on what was once the outskirts of Rome. It lies hidden by high walls from a busy traffic junction in the shadow of the Ostiense railway station and the Roman Pyramid of Cestius, which dates from 12BC. In addition to the graves of Shelley and Keats, both of whom died in Italy, it contains those of hundreds of 19th-century foreign residents and exiles, as well as that of Antonio Gramsci, the founding father of Italian Marxism. Founded in 1734, it is the oldest burial ground in continuous use in Europe. It was established on land donated by the Papal State and was for centuries the only place in Rome where non-Catholics could be buried. Its cramped grounds contain nearly 4,000 graves, many of them extravagant Victorian monuments dominated by carved angels. "It might make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place", Shelley wrote when Keats died. It receives no funding from the Italian State, relying on donations, and is managed by a volunteer committee of foreign diplomats, which makes for a lack of continuity. Others buried in the the cemetery include Hendrik Christian Andersen (18721940), the Norwegian sculptor and friend of Henry James; Karl Briullov (17991852), the Russian painter; Gregory Corso (19302001), the American beat poet; August von Goethe (17891830), son of the great German writer; and Axel Munthe (18571949), the Swedish author.