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According to the popular tradition, partially supported by documents, the church was built to comply with a vow made to the Virgin Mary in 1133 by the citizens of Bergamo to protect the city from the plague that was hitting northern Italy at that time

On the 23 of June 1449, the Senate and the Grand Council of Bergamo entrusted the management of the church to the Consorzio della Misericordia Maggiore, a prestigious association founded in 1265 by Pinamonte da Brembate, in order to preserve and enrich the artistic heritage of the Basilica. On the 14 of March 1453, Pope Nicholas V declared the church exempt from episcopal jurisdiction, and dependent on papal jurisdiction. This allowed the creation of free grammar and music schools for children in need, at the service of the liturgies in the Basilica.

= Protestant cemetery, Rome =

History
Since the norms of the Catholic Church forbade to bury in consecrated ground non-Catholics - including Protestants, Jews and Orthodox - as well as suicides and actors (these, after death, were "expelled" by the Christian community and buried outside the walls or at the extreme edge of the same) Burials occurred at night to avoid manifestations of religious fanaticism and to preserve the safety of those who participated in the funeral rites. An exception was made for Sir Walter Synod, who in 1821 managed to bury his daughter in broad daylight and, to be protected from incursions of fanatics, he was accompanied by a group of guards.

In the 18th and 19th centuries the area of the non-catholic cemetery was called "The meadows of the Roman people". It was an area of public property, where drovers used to graze the cattle, wine was kept in the cavities created in the so called Monte dei Cocci, an artifical hill, where the Romans went to have fun. The area was dominated by the Pyramid of Caius Cestius which for centuries was one of the most visited monuments of the City. It was the non-Catholics themselves who chose those places for their burials, and they were allowed by a decision of the Holy Office which in 1671 consented that to the "non-Catholic Lords" who died in the city was spared the shame of finding a burial together with prostitutes and sinners in the cemetery of the Muro Torto. The first burial of a Protestant was that of a follower of the exiled King James Stuart, named William Arthur, who died in Rome where he had come to escape the repressions following the defeats of the Jacobites in Scotland. Other burials followed, which did not concern only courtiers of King Stuart, who in the meanwhile had settled in Rome. It is said that in 1732 the treasurer of the King of England, William Ellis, was buried at the foot of the Pyramid. By that time the area had acquired the status of a cemetery of the British, although the people burried there were not only from the United Kingdom.

The cemetery developed without any official recognition and only at the end of 1700 the authorities started to take care of it. It was not until the 1920s that the government appointed a custodian to oversee the area and the cemetery functions. The public disinterest was mainly determined by the fact that in the current mentality, where the only burial concieved by the Chatolics were the ones happening in a church, the availability of a cemetery that provided non-Chatolic burials was not considered a privilege.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century in the cemetery area there was only holly, and there was no other natural nor artificial protection for the tombs scattered in the countryside, where cattels were grazing. The cypresses that adorn the cemetery today were planted later on. In 1824 a moat was erected that surrounded the ancient part of the cemetery. In ancient times crosses or inscriptions were forbidden, as in all non-Catholic cemeteries, at least until 1870.

For a long time there have been common graves divided by nations: Germany, Greece, Sweden and Romania.

As of 2011, the custody and management of the cemetery was entrusted to foreign representatives in Italy.

The great, hundred-year-old cypresses, the green meadow that surrounds part of the tombs, the white pyramid that stands behind the enclosure of Roman walls, together with the cats that walk undisturbed among the tombstones written in all the languages of the world, give to this small cemetery a peculiar aura. As in use in Anglo-Saxon cemeteries, there are no photographs on the tombstones.

Italians
The Non-catholic Cemetery of Rome is intended for the rest of all non-Catholics, without any distinction of nationality. However, there are very few illustrious Italians burried there. They were allowed a spot in the this cemetery for the alternative culture and ideas expressed in life ("foreign" compared to the dominant one), for the quality of their work, or for certain circumstances of their life for which they were somehow "foreign" in their own country. Among them, the politicians Antonio Gramsci and Emilio Lussu, the writer and poet Dario Bellezza, the writers Carlo Emilio Gadda and Luce d'Eramo and a few others. Recently it is very rare that new burrials are added. There is one expection; on 18 July 2019, the remains of the writer Andrea Camilleri were burried here.

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