There are times when I wonder if any of the things I have in my head about history (and everything else, but that is for another time) are true, maybe not in the sense of whether or not they happened, but in the way I have settled them into a nice little space in my world. I have something nicely packed away, and then a little fact comes along and either tosses it out or reframes it in such a way that it is completely unsettling.

For example, I thought I knew just about everything about the death of Keats. He died in 1821 in a little house on one side of the Spanish Steps in Rome, where he had come in the futile hope of curing himself of his tuberculosis. I have read the letters, and the biographies, and visited the house, and the grave, and there it all was settled away. Then, yesterday, I was reading a life of Mrs. Gaskell, the Victorian novelist, who happened to make a visit to Rome some years later. The biographer (Winifred Gerin), painting a little picture of the life of Rome, suddenly mentions the fact that the Spanish Steps was the traditional place where all the models in Rome went every day to display themselves for potential artists. They would dress in possible costumes and walk or pose up and down the steps: Roman centurions, Renaissance maidens, gypsies, kings, queens.   There is something about this that reframes for me the whole of Keats' short dying in Rome -- I am sure he must have delighted in this Fellini-esque scene while he had the chance, and it is a surreal backdrop to his last days. My way of thinking about his death is not completely different, but it is changed: perhaps because I always thought it was one of the saddest things I know of, and that it couldn't be any sadder, and now in some way it is.