San Michele Cemetery Island Site Features

The church of San Michele in Isola, rebuilt starting in 1469 by the architect Mauro Codussi, is considered the first fully Renaissance building in Venice -- its clean white stone facade and rounded forms broke from the Gothic style that still dominated the city at the time, years before the Renaissance reached Venice's other churches and palaces.

The cemetery itself is organized in walled, cypress-lined enclosures typical of Italian municipal cemeteries, divided into Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox sections. David Chipperfield's contemporary extension, added in phases from 2007 onward, includes a courtyard built around inlaid texts from the four Gospels, in a much sparer, modern style than the historic cemetery it adjoins.

Codussi's facade

The church front of 1469 is the hinge between two eras in Venetian building: white Istrian stone, a semicircular pediment, and a rusticated lower storey, at a moment when the city was still building Gothic. It faces the water, so the first thing seen on the crossing from Fondamente Nove is the first Renaissance facade in Venice.

The Emiliani chapel

A small hexagonal domed chapel of 1530 stands to the left of the church front, by Guglielmo dei Grigi. Its plan is unusual for Venice and it is often missed entirely, since it reads from the water as part of the church rather than a separate building.

The famous graves

Stravinsky and Diaghilev lie in the Orthodox section, close together -- Diaghilev's stone is habitually covered in ballet shoes left by visitors. Ezra Pound and Joseph Brodsky are in the Protestant section. All four are signposted from the entrance, which is the only concession the cemetery makes to visitors.

The leases

Most graves are held on a term of roughly a decade, after which remains are moved to an ossuary and the plot reused. The famous graves are exceptions; the ordinary ones around them turn over, which is why the cemetery has absorbed two centuries of a city's dead on an island of this size.

San Michele is a rectangular walled island in the northern lagoon, roughly halfway between Fondamente Nove and Murano -- close enough to the city that the crossing takes about ten minutes, far enough that it is unmistakably separate.

Its edges are the striking part. A continuous brick wall runs around the whole perimeter at the waterline, with cypresses rising above it, so from a passing vaporetto the island reads as a solid green-and-red block on the water rather than as a place with an interior.

The island's flatness and enclosure make it silent in a way little of Venice is. There is no through traffic, because nothing lies beyond it -- boats pass around rather than through, and the only arrivals are people coming here specifically.

Its shape is not original. San Michele and the neighbouring island of San Cristoforo were separate until the canal between them was filled in the 19th century to make room for the cemetery, so the island visitors walk today is two islands joined.