The cover photo for Morbid Curiosity #2, taken at Sacramento's Old City Cemetery.
Morbid Curiosity alumna M. Parfitt leads her first tour of Sacramento’s gorgeous Old City Cemetery on Saturday, April 2 at 10 a.m.
Here’s her announcement:
Blizzards, floods, storms at sea – Sacramento’s early citizens battled brutal weather to make it to the land of gold, or just to survive here. The Historic Old City Cemetery will highlight these determined pioneers with its “Storm Survivors” tour on Saturday, April 2nd. Knowledgeable tour guides will introduce you to brave Sacramentans who survived natural disasters through ingenuity, perseverance or just plain luck, during this fascinating tour.
This is a walking tour and starts at 10:00 a.m. at the front gate of the Cemetery at Broadway and 10th Streets. It will last about an hour and 15 minutes, as we stroll through the 1850 cemetery. Visitors can park across the street from the 10th Street Gate.
The Saturday History Tours are free. The Old City Cemetery Committee is a non-profit organization. Donations are appreciated and all funds go to restoration and preservation of the cemetery and the tombstones. For Tour information, please call (916) 448-0811.
Cimitero di San Michele in Isola
30121 Venice, Italy
Telephone: 041 5224119 Established: 1813 Size: 4 acres Number of interments: Difficult to say, since most Venetians are only granted a 10-year lease on their graves, before their bones are removed to an ossuary. Open: The island is open daily from 7:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. during the winter, or until 6 p.m. April-September. The Church San Michele in Isola is open daily from 7:30 a.m. to 12:15 p.m., and again in the afternoons from 3-4 p.m.
Attention: In connection with Obscura Day 2011, Context Travel is offering a private tour of Venice’s cemetery island. More information is here.
Ever since Napoleon closed the city’s churchyards, Venetians have buried their dead on an island near Murano. No one seems to offer recurring tours of San Michele in Isola, but you can catch a vaporetto on the Fondamente Nuove, at the northern edge of the city, and wander the island for yourself. The Cadogan guidebook Italy: Three Cities suggests you get a rough map from the caretaker, but he wasn’t around the day I visited. I still had a wonderful time.
Originally there were two islands: San Michele in Isola and San Cristoforo della Pace. The Venetian churchyards were first emptied onto Cristoforo, but when that didn’t provide enough space, engineers joined the two islands by filling the canal between them. To this day, San Michele in Isola remains the main civil cemetery for Venice.
The cemetery island takes its name from the Church of Saint Michael, which has existed on the island since the 10th century. In 1212, it became a hermitage of Camaldolesian friars. Mauro Codussi built the “new” church, the first Renaissance chapel in Venice, in 1496. Dedicated to the archangel Michael, who will hold the scales on Judgment Day, it was restored in 1562 and several times since.
Grave monuments lining the wall of the cloister begin to hint at the impressive skills of Italian sculptors showcased in the cemetery. The most breathtaking relief depicted a seated nude holding a book across his hips; the pages read “Sacred to the Honor of” in English. Death, wimpled like a nun, grasped his shoulder and leaned close to whisper in his ear.
In a garden dedicated to servicemen, a brilliant Murano glass mosaic sparkled on a monument to the ambulance drivers of World War II. On a field of gold, four white-coated men leaned above a bleeding soldier. It was one of the most graphic tombstones I’d ever seen.
Inside the Reparto Greco, the section for the Orthodox faith, composer Igor Stravinsky and his wife Vera lie in graves along the back wall. When I visited, a pair of white roses with long stems crossed adorned the slab over Stravinsky’s grave. A red silk poinsettia, anchored in a pile of stones, burned like crimson flame on the lower left corner. Above that, a curving stalk of lavender reminded me of a treble clef.
Not far from Stravinsky stands the monument to Sergei Diaghilev. Atop Diaghilev’s grave rested a pair of weathered pointe shoes, wrapped in their own faded pink satin ribbons. What a beautiful tribute to the impresario of the Ballet Russe, who brought Russian dancers to the West and changed the history of ballet.
Tucked away in a tattered garden called the Reparto Evangelico lay Protestant foreigners who died while visiting Venice. It struck me as poignant to see graves in Italy that read “Hier ruht” and “Here lies” instead of “Requiescat en pace.” A rusted iron cross, tilted against the weathered brick wall, bore the simple legend “Auf wiedersehen.”
A stele on one grave showed a praying mother, shrouded from head to ankles, begging as a Pre-Raphaelite angel led her child away. Even though the girl stretched a hand back toward her mother, her feet had already left the surface of the earth. A gang of cherubim sang above, but their false cheer seemed mocking to me, cruel.
A grave that caught our attention was bounded by a low curb and blanketed with ivy. It belonged to the Russian poet Josef Brodsky, whose life had been turned upside by reading Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground. Venice seemed a long way away from Leningrad, where Brodsky was born, and Brooklyn, where he died.
Also buried in the Reparto Evangelico is the poet Ezra Pound. Despite an hour’s searching, I couldn’t find his monument when I visited. The caretaker’s map might have come in handy.
I found this wonderful little book on eBay, so I have no idea how easy it might be to come by. All I know is that this morning, as I write this, neither Amazon or Goodreads has a listing for it.
The book contains several black-and-white reproductions of paintings of the Cestius pyramid at the edge of the graveyard. I enjoyed comparing my memories of it to the empty pastoral landscapes in the paintings.
The book also includes crisp photographs of the more recent gravestones. I especially like the photo of Keats’s grave, taken when the trees were bare to counteract the shadows that fall over the Parte Antica. There aren’t as many photos as I’d like, of course, and the black-and-white doesn’t do justice to the lush green grass or the huge chrysanthemums lying on Shelley’s stone, but it’s still a lovely book anyway.
The text summarizes the cemetery’s history and highlights some of its noteworthy denizens. Brief essays discuss Keats’ burial and Shelley’s funeral. Toward the back of the book, a fold-out map is keyed to an alphabetical list of permanent residents.
Another of Culbertson and Randall’s cemetery guides, Permanent Italians spans Rome, Florence, and Venice, with quick trips to Naples, Padua, and beyond. For English-speaking travelers, this is your introduction to several millennia of grave monuments in Italy.
Permanent Italians gave me a greater understanding of the history encapsulated by the Tomb of Augustus and encouraged me to visit the church of Santa Maria del Popolo, which is full of amazing skeletal memento mori artwork. In fact, the book is wonderful for adding things to your itinerary as you travel.
That said, however, Permanent Italians, because of its brevity, sometimes lacks depth. The Protestant Cemetery of Rome gets a scant 14 pages, when a whole book would do. Milan’s Cimitero Monumental (where the authors say, “You could shout for joy at the beauty of the sculpture around you”) only rates 11 pages. My advice is to take Permanent Italians with you as you travel, but plan to consult deeper resources when you return.
Finally, like all cemetery guides pre-GPS, the directions inside graveyards can be confusing. I relied on Permanent Italians’ suggestion to follow the signs to Ezra Pound’s grave, but even though the Reparto Evangelico of Venice’s San Michele Cemetery isn’t large, I couldn’t find him anywhere. A photo of the headstone would have helped. That’s my major complaint about this book: its photos only hint at the artwork jamming Italian cemeteries. It focuses on famous people, while slighting the beauty of the monuments of total strangers. (So I suppose my criticism is that this is not the guidebook I would have written. I agree: this is not entirely fair.)
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