Where the dead of Venice lie buried

IT SOUNDS a bit like a pub quiz question: composer Igor Stravinsky, ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev and poet Ezra Pound, are all buried in Italy – but where in Italy?

The answer, of course, is Venice. But where in Venice? Well, head for the Fondamenta Nuove waterbus stop and hop aboard either a No 41 or a 42 vaporetto, as if you’re planning to visit Murano, the island where the beautiful coloured glass is manufactured. But you’re not. You’re getting off early, on the island of San Michele, where the dead of Venice, locals and blow-ins alike, are buried – and have been since the early 19th century.

San Michele was artificially joined to the adjacent San Cristoforo many years ago to create additional space. But even so, the cemetery is jam-packed with hundreds of thousands of tombs, from the lavishly monumental to the painfully modest.

So packed is it that nowadays nobody finds a permanent resting place here. The bodies in each row of graves are allowed to decompose happily for 12 years – at which point families can pay for re-interment in small metal storage boxes, or the bones are tossed into a nearby boneyard, grandly known as an ossuary.

Every year during All Saints Week there’s a free vaporetto service to ferry the inhabitants of Venice the short journey to visit their loved ones.

A regular visitor on that San Michele route was Olga Rudge – “a consummate violinist” and for many years the constant companion of Ezra Pound – who remained living in their narrow three-storey house in Venice after the poet died in 1972, at the age of 87.

On March 19th, 1996, an obituary in the New York Timesnoted that Rudge had just died, aged 101. In actual fact, she died a month before her 101st birthday. They are buried side by side in the Protestant section of the cemetery.