Isola di San Michele: Floating Island of the Dead

Have been dreaming about a visit. Have been dreaming. I saw it from a boat last I was in Venice (did I take a photo?), but didn't visit. I'm hoping to bump into Uncle Ezra and a few other distant relatives.

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San Michele is an island in the Venetian Lagoon, northern Italy. It is associated with the sestiere of Cannaregio, from which it lies a short distance northeast.


History

Along with neighbouring San Cristoforo della Pace, the island was a popular place for local travellers and fishermen to land. Mauro Codussi's Chiesa di San Michele in Isola of 1469, the first Renaissance church in Venice, and a monastery lie on the island, which also served for a time as a prison.

San Cristoforo was selected to become a cemetery in 1807, designed by Gian Antonio Selva, when under French occupation it was decreed that burial on the mainland (or on the main Venetian islands) was unsanitary. The canal that separated the two islands was filled in during 1836, and subsequently the larger island became known as San Michele. Bodies were carried to the island on special funeral gondolas. Among those buried there are Igor Stravinsky, Joseph Brodsky, Jean Schlumberger, Christian Doppler, Frederick Rolfe, Horatio Brown, Sergei Diaghilev, Ezra Pound, Luigi Nono, Catherine Bagration, Franco Basaglia, Zoran Mušič, Helenio Herrera, Emilio Vedova, and Salvador de Iturbide y Marzán. The cemetery is still in use today.

[From Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isola_di_San_Michele]



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[Photo from Wikimedia Commons: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:150405_San_Michele.jpg
Photograph by Aconcagua]





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