Surprisingly, the signage at San Michele Cemetery, located on a Venetian island, was very explicit about where to look for the graves of famous people buried there, especially in comparison to Forest Lawn. It still took some methodical searching to find Ezra Pound; Joseph Brodsky remained elusive. I've never read either poet, the first a famously anti-Semitic American and fascist, the other a Russian-born Jew and the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature.
As my mother might have joked, people have been dying to get in here since the early 19th century. Many of the oldest tombs are found within a 15th-century cloister which monks not ghosts used to inhabit.
The island cemetery is actually a public health innovation of Napoleon, whose army occupied in Venice in 1804. Up until that time, Venetian bodies typically had been interred in church crypts, causing what was then believed to be a "miasma" that spread disease.
San Michele is a Christian cemetery, with different sections for Catholics, Protestants (only 600 have been buried here in the last 150 years) and Eastern Orthodox. Jews (other than Brodsky) were buried on the Lido. There's also a section reserved for "bambini"or children.
Ladders are needed to place flower arrangements.
I'm guessing this guy was a pediatrician.
It's kind of shocking to see how some of the gravesites have fallen into such disrepair.
"Rites of Spring" composer Igor and wife Vera Stravinsky are buried in the Eastern Orthodox section.
Serge Diaghilev, Stravinsky's artistic collaborator and founder of the Ballets Russes, rests nearby, along with many other Russian and Greek expatriates.
This is the smaller of the two churches on the island, with almost no profile on the internet. From its name, I'm guessing it was the remnant of San Michele's merger with a nearby island, San Cristoforo della Pace, in 1839 to accommodate more burials.
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| Chiesa di San Christoforo |
The church is at the center of a hemispherical wall lined with tombstones.
This poor angel must not get a lot of sun.
Sculpted representations of women other than the Virgin Mary and angels are very uncommon.
This monument honors Venetian World War I veterans.
Watering cans are provided as well as ladders.
But most of the flowers seem to be of the plastic variety.
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