Cimitero

The city’s cemetery was established on Isola di San Michele under Napoleon. Until then, Venetians had been buried in parish plots across town – not the most salubrious solution, as Napoleon’s inspectors realised. Today, Goths, incorrigible romantics, and music lovers pause here to visit the final resting places of Ezra Pound, Sergei Diaghilev and Igor Stravinsky. Look for their graves in the (signposted) northeast sector of the island; they are in the ‘acatholic’ (read Protestant and Orthodox) sections. Architecture buffs stop by to see the high Renaissance, white Istrian stone Chiesa di San Michele in Isola begun by Codussi in 1469. Cemetery extensions are in the works by David Chipperfield Architects, based on the firm’s completed Courtyard of the Four Evangelists : a rather gloomy bunker, with a concrete colonnade and basalt-clad walls engraved with the gospels.