The Three-Year-Old Son the Shelleys Lost in a Roman Summer in 1819
William Shelley — Percy and Mary Shelley's first surviving son, born in 1816 in the immediate aftermath of the Villa Diodati summer — died of malaria in Rome on 7 June 1819. He is buried in the Protestant Cemetery at the foot of the Pyramid of Cestius, in the same enclosure where his father would be interred three years later.
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