DEATH IN VENICE – 2009
VENICE IN AUGUST. The coaches are stacking up by the multi-storey parks on Piazzale Roma; the cut-price flights are rolling into Marco Polo; the cruise ships heave in and out, rounding the bell tower of San Giorgio Maggiore, reducing a former imperial capital to the scale of Toy Town. With the annual rate of visitors running at 20 million, the daily tourist total in August must approach 100,000 – while the resident population halves to about 30,000. This is the month to avoid. The police have to impose a one-way pedestrian traffic system over the Rialto Bridge. The heat, the noise, the smell, the people. Venetians in general are unbelievably polite to tourists, but not in August. The hard core of residents have dropped the mask of welcome. Nowadays they have their own private waterbus, the No. 3. “Solo Abbonamento” the conductor shouts at the packed ranks of bemused tourists, as the bus crashes into the pontoon. “Seezone tiggerd ernleee”. What? The vaporetto pulls out into the Grand Canal empty but for its three resident abbonamenti who are enjoying this. They are carrying shopping baskets. They loll on the empty benches and sneer at the frustrated horde left on the pontoon and strike up pleasant conversations among themselves, probably using the Venetian dialect. It is not hard to imagine what they are saying.
Later in the day I take the black line – Linea No. 1, a real horde shifter – from San Marco out to the Lido. I have a rendezvous in one place where the crowds will not be going, the Jewish cemetery of San Nicolo. She is waiting for me beneath the shade of a tall cypress tree within the walls. As I approach the iron gates she unlocks them and ushers out a group of sardonic French publishers. Then she locks the gates behind us. Mine is a private visit. In French. We have reached the moment in the evening when the heat still drives us into the shade, just the place to encounter the tiger mosquitoes that have started to rise from the grass. My guide has a sheath of notes on the more significant graves. “You don’t like the mosquitoes?” she asks in surprise. “They never bother me”. Suddenly she drops her notes, slumps back onto a gravestone and lowers her voice. “Do you want me to tell you what we really think of tourists?” she hisses. The answer is “No.” I do not want her to tell me this. On any account. But she is not interested in my answer. She leans forward. Her eyes narrow. “We hate them”. Oh, really? “Even I hate them. And I work as a tourist guide! Monsieur, you are assisting in a terrible crime. The assassination of the most beautiful city in the world”. She falls silent and we consider the situation.
Evening and the light of evening beyond the cemetery walls reflected from the lagoon; cicadas, mosquitoes. My new vocation as an assassin announced and ordained in a cemetery. But this cemetery is no longer in use. It is an ancient monument protected from the neglect of two hundred years. When children were rebuked by Théophile Gautier for dancing on the broken graves they replied, “But they are Jews!” The restored tombstone I am reading refers to Lea, wife of Jacob, who died on 10 March 5461 (1701, I think). This Jacob must have been an optimist, to choose Lea against all biblical warning. Perhaps he did not know any young women called Rachel. The Jewish community in 17thcentury Venice was quite small, reduced by the plague, which ran through the overcrowded Ghetto in 1633. But there is no time to develop this reflection. She is off again.
“In the last five years it has become impossible to live in this city. They are everywhere. I cannot even take my children to school in the morning! The waterbus is too full. We try to get on and there they are again. With their cameras. And their ridiculous back bags. Taking all the space. Taking more photographs! I tell you, Venice is doomed. The city is dying.” The bile pours out and the mosquitoes continue to give her a miss. Later I describe this unusual experience in the cemetery to an Italian resident. The passion in my guide’s voice, the desperation. He shrugs. “So what?” he says. “If they want to die, let them die”. But he was born in Genoa. He may be relishing the spectacle. Venice conclusively defeated Genoa in a naval battle in 1380, a date not forgotten in Genoa. He must be a fellow assassin.
THE FIRST TIME I came to this place, the city closed down for the winter. From the window of the train there was a restricted view of water and early morning fog as we crossed the causeway. Then, nothing. A cavernous Italian railway station. A very long, icy platform. At the end the welcoming lights of a station buffet, with hot coffee and the sticky buns that Italians call croissants. There was a plate glass wall to one side of the room but it was completely steamed up. I prolonged my breakfast for as long as I could, reluctant to leave the shelter of the modern world and set out in search of the past, wondering where the antique system of canals would begin. Nothing prepared me for the wonder that lay behind the fogged up glass: the great flight of steps, the sunshine breaking through the thin mist that was curling up from the surface of the water, the rush hour bustle of boats on the Grand Canal on a working morning, the expressions of fellow passengers on the vaporetto – mildly disappointed to see a visitor when the city was closed; lineano.1, bound for St Mark’s Square, but without the hordes.
I walked everywhere on that visit through what seemed a half-deserted city. It was the week between Christmas and New Year. The Accademia was shut, many of the shops remained shuttered. There seemed to be more cats than people. But somebody was feeding them. Sheets of newspaper bearing scraps of food were laid down on the most abandoned streets. I was struck by the size of the city, a misty labyrinth in which one was almost immediately lost. One day, without a map, I set out in an unexplored direction to see what would happen. After several hours of wandering from café to church to bridge I reached a long quay at dusk looking out over an immense lagoon. I have completed the same walk since in about 25 minutes, but never with the same pleasure that comes from entering a maze and becoming hopelessly lost. When I reached the quay that first time it was evening, there was a light burning through the fog at the end of a pier and the thud of unseen engines out in the lagoon. A boat arrived and I boarded it without any idea of its direction. In the twilight I could see that we were approaching an island. High brick walls enclosed the shoreline, a row of damp, dark cypresses, a dome behind wrought-iron gates. It seemed huge and forbidding. The boat did not stop. Later I realised that we had passed a Venetian curiosity, the burial island of San Michele.
VENETIANS HAVE always shown a lively appreciation of the rituals of death. Henry James who described the entire city as “the most beautiful of tombs” also wrote of a gondolier’s pitying reference to a poor woman’s funeral “with only two gondolas” as though the main purpose of funerals was “to amuse the living”. By tradition the Venetians revere ghosts. On the vigil of All Souls the dead leave San Michele and cross the lagoon into the city and move in procession down every street. As each ghost passes his front door he enters his old house and takes a seat by the kitchen stove. It is very important not to look out of the window on the vigil of All Souls. It is most unlucky see the procession pass by. And there is a legend concerning a reckless parish priest who preached that “where the dead lie, the dead stay”. That night he was dragged out of his bed and beaten up by ghosts. Respect! And the ghosts seem to have prevailed. Today, in Venice, very few of the dead are allowed to stay where they lie. Space on San Michele is so limited that most bodies are dug up and removed after as little as ten years, depending on demand. The bones are loaded onto a barge and consigned to a municipal bonepit.
To reach the island of San Michele you have to board linea 42 running between Fondamenta Nuove, Murano and the islands of the north. The leading guidebook to Venice written by the late JG Links shows little interest in San Michele. Having noted that it was Napoleon who decreed that the former monastery island should become a cemetery, in the interest of hygiene, Links adds: “We ourselves are unlikely to visit San Michele, unless there is a Protestant grave we wish to find. Only Protestants remain there for more than 10 years”. This is not exactly true. The cemetery contains several sections where even Catholics have found permanent rest. But the privilege is expensive. The permanent graves, stacked up like wall safes, are not always easy to distinguish. Some of these graves go back for more than a century and rest suspended, “in perpetuity”, though no one visits them today. The regulation causes great resentment. In a city that is being assassinated, the cemetery is a political issue. The city authorities have recently constructed an impressive new wall safe facility. On the day of my visit it lay waiting behind locked gates, gleaming in the sunshine like a miniature housing estate, waiting for the arrival of those at the head of the death council’s unpublished list.
There are few distinguished names on the gravestones of San Michele. Robert Browning died in Venice and lay in state on the burial island, but his final journey continued to Westminster Abbey. Casanova, a Venetian anti-hero and a metaphorical assassin, very nearly acquired an early grave when his gondola ran into a storm off San Michele. It was not a good moment to die since he was returning from an assignation at a convent on Murano. He was convinced that he was going to drown but his gondoliers saved him.
There are two celebrated tombs in the Orthodox section, known as the Greco. A steady trickle of pilgrims comes to this half empty garden to visit the graves of Diaghilev and Stravinski. The demand for these Orthodox plots seems to have dried up in 1917, when Russians stopped travelling and catching malaria. On Diaghilev’s stone there is a bunch of fresh freesias and a well-worn pair of pink ballet shoes, without the points. On Stravinski’s there are pebbles and coins and shells scattered and sweets wrapped in coloured paper. A Mexican pilgrim has left a message on scrap paper reading “Gracias Maestro” and signed it with musical notes.
The Protestant section, the Evangelico, is also a walled garden but better patronised.
Here lies Ezra Pound, who took refuge in Venice after being released from an American mental asylum where he had been consigned because of his embarrassing pro-fascist opinions. H e stayed in the city that had inspired his first poetry from 1958 until his death aged 87, in 1972. But most of the graves seem to be English, relics of the nineteenth century English community, which was numerous.
The Evangelico is like all the best Italian gardens; ivy creeping along the ground between the trees and over the stones, shadow and sunlight, cicadas and a few spiders and the scent of cypress needles in the dust. And when the cicadas fall silent, there is a profound peace and the contrast between this Venetian garden and the familiar English phrases engraved around. “Blessed are the pure in heart”, “Who died in this city”, “Fondly loved wife…” It is clear from the inscriptions that many of these visitors to “the city of fevers” had been surprised by death. They had thought they were just passing through. They include the commander of the Cunard steam ship Taripa, born in Chepstow, died in Venice, in1872, and a lady called Mitford who died on her honeymoon in 1885, aged 24. Her grieving husband marked her tomb with the words, “The spirit and the bride say come”. But there are no other names on the stone. Perhaps he married again and had more luck. The epitaph to Leading Cook’s Mate F.H. Madden, of His Majesty’s Torpedo Boat No. 17, who died in 1918, eloquently evokes a vanished age – reticent and tightly-knit. “Rest in Peace – his loving Father, Mother, Sisters, Brothers… and Elsie”.
Returning to the modern cemetery one is back in a noisier and more demonstrative land. Here death moves in constant attendance and the living are kept busy. An overhead loudspeaker blares out, “Staff announcement, staff announcement”, and gravedigger No. 23 is summoned to the supervisor’s office, Now. The buzzing of a line of strimmers moving across the wide central grassland is interrupted by an Italian mourner, female with a voice like a pneumatic drill, who is giving one of the gardeners a hard time. He drops his strimmer and accompanies her obediently to the scene of complaint. This area is in constant use and walking up the central avenue one can see that it is divided by moving boundary lines into four zones of activity that are exact indicators of the passage of time. First there is an empty plot the size of a football pitch that is dominated by a line of mechanical diggers. This has been cleared, levelled and re-sown and is the section ready for immediate occupation. Adjoining it is the division containing the most recently filled graves. This is the busiest part of the cemetery, the focus of its daily activity. Here small groups move among gravestones that are decorated with fresh flowers. This active section shades into the next, which occupies most of the cemetery; these are the graves that have been dug over the last ten to fifteen years.
As one walks back through the lines into the past, wreaths become older, rarer, plastic or just absent, until one reaches the oldest graves, and then one is back where one started in the cleared space, with its line of mechanical diggers, and a little board bearing a brief notice which has been attached to a stake and hammered into the ground beside the very last line of all. Last August this was headed: “Programma esumazioni 2008”. There followed a list of ten names starting with D— Regina who died on 21 March 1990 and ending with Z— Umberto, 12 June 1990. Come in Umberto, your time is up. Unknown to each other in life, united by chance in a single row of the central campo of San Michele, Regina and Umberto are booked in for a common resurrection. “The grave’s a fine and private place”, wrote Marvell. “But none I think do there embrace…” Well, in Venice he was wrong, twice.
At the end of the long central avenue stand the tall brick walls and marble columns and stone arches of the southern gate which is kept locked and which looks out over the broad channel dividing San Michele from the city. From here one can see a line of buildings stretching from the dome of San Giovanni e Paolo to the bell tower of the Madonna dell’ Orto. In the centre the outline of marble angels, crowding the pediment of the Gesuiti. There is the fluctuating background rumble of the waterbuses out on the lagoon, and somewhere in the city, half a mile across the water, a dog has started to bark. San Michele with its shady avenues and the crumbling dignity of the Evangelico evokes the lost world of Byron and Henry James more powerfully than any other corner of the surviving city. One is back in December, even in August.
Endit
Update: By 2025 the number of residents had fallen from 60,000 to 48,342, and the annual total of tourists had risen to 30 million.