Isola di San Michele

San Michele is an island in the lagoon of Venice between Venice and Murano, which is the same cemetery of Venice. The island has an approximately rectangular plan, with a length of 460 meters, a width of 390 meters and an area of ​​17.6 hectares. The 2001 census has 11 permanent residents after on the island, all male. The island is struggling with a lack of space, so the dead are first buried in graves normal, but exhumed again after a few years and stacked high in blocks.

History

Since the 13th century was on San Michele a monastery of Camaldoli, by the still of the cloister, the Renaissance church of San Michele, built by Mauro Codussi from 1469 in Isola, and the 1530 built by Guglielmo Bergamasco hexagonal Cappella Emiliani are obtained. In this monastery, the monk Fra Mauro drew 1457-1459 its circular world map.

Cemetery

After the secularization of the monastery and the edict of Napoleon on 11 June 1804 that was binding on Venice, and the burial of the dead was banned in the immediate vicinity of churches, were joined in 1837 the island of San Michele, the island of San Cristoforo and then built the surrounded by a wall and planted with cypresses central cemetery, which replaced the earlier cemeteries at the parish churches of Venice. From 1858 the cemetery under the direction of coming from Treviso architects Annibale Forcellini was extended. Forcellini had heaped up the site to make it flood-proof, straightened the area and surrounded it with a high brick wall. The cemetery itself is laid out like a Greek cross, cypress accompany the two main axes; the grave fields are each separated by walls that contain the columbaria. The ossuaries are lined up on the north side.

Since the cemetery was found in spite of the extension to be no longer sufficient, the city began in 1998 with the project an expansion to 60 000 m² with planned 15 000 tombs. Architect of this system is David Chipperfield. The complex includes a chapel, a crematorium, columbaria, lawns and fountains. The new part of the cemetery, of which the first section is already completed, is called Corte dei Quattro Evangelisti. The entire plant is to be completed by 2013.

Buried here are, inter alia, the composer Ermanno Wolf- Ferrari, Luigi Nono and Igor Stravinsky, the poet Ezra Pound, the writer Joseph Brodsky and ballet impresario Sergei Diaghilev of, but also the Argentine football coach Helenio Herrera. For the physicist Christian Doppler, there is a commemorative plaque, his burial place in Venice but has not yet been discovered.

The older part of the cemetery is divided by denomination. Thus, numerous ambassadors from the Nordic countries ( Protestants ) are buried in the Protestant part.

The island of Sant ' Ariano the north- east was behind Torcello ossuary as "blue sky " for the cemeteries in the area. Behind an impenetrable wall of brambles and the bones are piled several feet high.