The Cypresses of San Michele Cemetery

Venice's dead live on an island of their own, and the cypresses that ring it are the first thing anyone sees crossing the lagoon toward it. The idea was Napoleon's: his 1804 Edict of Saint-Cloud banned burial within cities for public health reasons, and Venice, unable to bury its dead on land it did not have, chose the island of San Cristoforo della Pace, merging it with the neighbouring islet of San Michele in stages between 1813 and 1839. Architect Giannantonio Selva, who had designed the Napoleonic Gardens across the lagoon a few years earlier, laid out the cemetery's original plan, and cypress became its signature planting, a tree with its own funerary tradition stretching back to antiquity. No individual tree here carries a published planting date or measurement, so the exact age of any specimen standing today is unverified, but the dark spires visible above the cemetery's brick walls have been part of the approach to Venice for close to two centuries. Ezra Pound, Igor Stravinsky and Joseph Brodsky are buried among them.