San Michele Cemetery Island Historical Timeline

Origins

A church dedicated to St. Michael the Archangel and an adjoining monastery stood on this island long before it became a cemetery. In 1469, the church was rebuilt by the architect Mauro Codussi in a new classical style -- considered the first Renaissance building in Venice, years before the style spread to the city's other churches and palaces.

Turning points

The island's role changed entirely in the early 19th century. Napoleon's 1804 Edict of Saint-Cloud banned burials inside city churches and crypts on public health grounds, and in 1807 Venice designated San Michele as its official cemetery -- moving the dead outside the city for the first time in its history.

Influential people

Separate sections were later added for non-Catholic burials: a Protestant section serving Waldensian, Anglican, and Lutheran communities, and an Orthodox section established in 1816 for the city's Greek and Russian residents. It is in these two sections that San Michele's best-known graves are found -- the composer Igor Stravinsky and ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev in the Orthodox section, and the poets Ezra Pound and Joseph Brodsky in the Protestant one.

Cultural evolution

Space on the island has always been limited. Rather than expanding indefinitely, many graves are leased for a fixed term -- commonly around 12 years -- after which the remains are exhumed and moved to a communal ossuary to free the plot for reuse, a practical solution to burying a city's dead on an island with no room to grow.

Present-day significance

San Michele remains an active cemetery today, still receiving Venetian burials alongside the graves that draw literary and musical visitors from abroad. Since the late 1990s, the architect David Chipperfield has designed a phased extension to the cemetery, with new courtyards opening in stages starting in 2007 to relieve some of that longstanding pressure on space.