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San Michele Cemetery

To Die in Venice: The Venetian Lagoon's Island Graveyard

by Durant Imboden

When the Piazza San Marco has more tourists than pigeons and the No. 1 vaporetto is wallowing under the weight of its passengers on the Grand Canal, there's one place in Venice where the crowds are quiet and unobtrusive: the Isola di San Michele, a former prison island less than five minutes away by water bus.

San Michele is Venice's cemetery--a role it has borne with dignity since the early 1800s, when Napoleon's occupying forces told the Venetians to start hauling their dead across the water instead of burying them all over town.

A cruise ship for the departed

In The World of Venice, Jan Morris compares the cemetery island to a ship where "the director stands as proudly in his great graveyard as any masterful cruiser captain, god-like on his bridge."

"The church at the corner of the island is beautifully cool, austere and pallid, and is tended by soft-footed Franciscans ... The cemetery itself is wide and calm, a series of huge gardens, studded with cypress trees and awful monuments.

"Not long ago it consisted of two separate islands, San Michele and San Cristoforo, but now they have been artificially joined, and the whole area is cluttered with hundreds of thousands of tombs--some lavishly monumental, with domes and sculputures and wrought-iron gates, some stacked in high modern terraces, some stacked in high modern terraces, like filing systems."

The word "cluttered" seems a bit unfair. The Catholic areas of San Michele are laid out with far greater precision and formality than you'd find in the typical American or British cemetery.

Walls separate the various areas, and the graves lie in neat (if tightly packed) rows that are separated by walking paths for the convenience of mourners and visitors.

Here and there, the path leads to a border of contiguous marble-topped crypts that must be traversed to leave the garden. ("Is it okay to walk on the tombs, honey?" "I dunno. But we're wearing our rubber-soled shoes, so maybe the caretaker won't notice.")

Segregation by sect 

ABOVE: Vaporetti run to the island almost constantly during All Saints' Week.

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."

"Your checkout time is 2029"

ABOVE: Mausoleums at the San Michele island cemetery. INSET BELOW: Venetians visit family members' graves during All Saints' Week.

Death may be permanent, but San Michele is so crowded that graves are on short-term lease. The bodies in each row of graves are allowed to decompose for twelve years, at which point they're dug up.

Occupants whose families can pay for reinterment are transferred to small metal boxes for permanent storage in smaller quarters. The less well-heeled get tossed into a nearby boneyard.

In the old days, bones were dumped on the ossuary island of Sant'Ariano, which Michael Dibdin describes in his novel Dead Lagoon:

"...The surface inside was much higher, almost level with the top of the wall. Giacomo stepped down and started to push his way through the undergrowth, following a series of almost imperceptible markers: the torn ligaments of a branch dangling from a bush, a patch of flattened grass, the sucker of a bramble bush, thick as a squid's tentacle, lopped off clean by a fisherman's gutting-knife.

"The ground crunched and slithered underfoot, as though he were walking on layers of broken crockery.

"A sudden scuttling noise brought him to a halt, wielding his torch-beam like a staff. The island was infested with snakes, and Giacomo tried with limited success to convince himself that this was the only feature of the place that scared him."

How to reach San Michele

If you're dead, the undertaker will deliver you to the cemetery by aquatic hearse (or by funeral gondola if your survivors have a flair for the dramatic).

For a more temporary visit, catch the No. 41 or 42 vaporetto at the Fondamenta Nuove platform.

Get off the boat at the first stop, "Cimitero."

 After you've visited San Michele, you might want to continue on to Murano, the glass island, via the same waterbus line.

Book suggestion: 

Permanent Italians, a trade paperback by Judi Culbertson and Tom Randall, has a chapter on the late and the great who are buried or entombed in Venice.

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About the author:

Durant Imboden has written about Venice, Italy since 1996. He covered Venice and European travel at About.com for 4-1/2 years before launching Europe for Visitors (including Venice for Visitors) with Cheryl Imboden in 2001.

PC Magazine has called this "the premier visitors' site for Venice, Italy." Over the years, it has helped more than 30 million travelers. For more information, see About our site, our Europe for Visitors press clippings, and our reader testimonials.

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