To die in Venice:
A visit to San Michele Cemetery
Continued from page 1

Segregation by sect

Most of San Michele's acreage is reserved for Catholics--a fact that's hardly surprising in a country where Roman Catholics, practicing or otherwise, make up the vast majority of the population. In Venice: The Art of Living, Frédéric Viteaux describes the Catholic cemetery during All Saints' Week:

"A free vaporetto takes the inhabitants of the city from the Fondamenta Nuove to the island. The women carry flowers--their figures swallowed up by pots of huge chrsyanthemums, rumpled and white, yellow, and pink. They look like an army of flowers on the march disembarking in front of the church and the Emiliani chapel, filing into the right-angle lanes of the cemetery. The chrysanthemums advance like the forest in Macbeth. The living have done their duty. They return to the vaporetto, satisfied. Perhaps the dead are, too."

The island has two mini-graveyards for other Christian sects: the Greci or Greek Orthodox cemetery, where Igor Stravisky and Sergei Diaghilev are buried; and the Protestant graveyard, whose most famous resident is Ezra Pound. (Jews have their own cemetery on the Lido, Venice's resort island.)

In contrast to the formal and beautifully tended Catholic gardens of graves, the Greci and Protestant sections have an atmosphere of rustic decay. Some tombstones are covered in moss; a few lean at precipitous angles; several have keeled over in a parody of those whose deaths they commemorate. The occasional English epitaph reminds visitors of a time when the British upper classes regarded Venice as a home away from home. The most famous inscription honors a Staffordshire man who was said to have "Left us in peace, Febry 2, 1910."

Next page: "Your checkout time is 2018"

Home

Copyright © 1996-2008 Durant and Cheryl Imboden and their licensors.
All rights reserved.

Privacy Policy