San Michele Cemetery Island Site Features

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.