Cemetery Island (Isola di San Michele)

The Cemetery Island I am referring to is an island in the Venetian Lagoon. It is only accessible from a single jetty, a short vaporetto ride from Venice herself. On this island is a cemetery, a church, and a public toilet. I visited Cemetery Island whilst on holiday alone on a hot August afternoon. The Island was all but deserted, I had a leisurely lunch (a single slice of pizza, if that’s lunch), whilst being gawked at by hungry sparrows, to whom I relinquished my crust.

From Venice, the island seems an enigma. It has tall brick walls encasing it from the azure waters and a decorative set of wide steps that run directly into the water, as if the sea herself would ride up them to mourn her citizens. I was the only vaporetto wayfarer to disembark. I suppose most tourists don’t wish to spend their time with the dead, but then Venice is an odd choice of destination, her opulence is a thin mask over the stench of the quagmire it’s become, death is now her greatest masquerade. 

Subdivided into plots that vary in age, the cemetery functioned like a walled garden, only all the flowers were non-living, contrary to the profusion of watering cans would suggest, very few of the hundreds of graves were adorned with living flowers, their plastic cousins replacing them for all eternity. A plot of barren land yet to be planted with marble entablatures, a grave-less garden inertly anxious for deaths ripe fruit. This patch of allotted hollow spots seemed more morbid than the rows of populated graves, the expectation of death more callous than the memorials to it. 

There are four essential elements to the traditional Islamic Garden: Water, Pomegranate, Rose, and Jasmine. It is also prerequisite that the garden be enclosed, typically by walls.

Place yourself in the old town of Granada, a place of unending inaccessible Moorish gardens, now kept by the second home elite. I walked tirelessly around the suggestions to interior worlds tiring to compose their jewels in my mind. The jasmine and rose were the easiest to locate and claim, their climbing nature meant they spilled over walls into the street below - the most common of these was a new breed yellow rose that held its flowers in fists, small rings of petals crushed into knotted blooms. This rose seemed to enjoy the mild climate of Granada, though I doubt it was one of the original plants in any of the walled Moorish oasis. The jasmines that poured themselves into alleyways were typically of a peach-white tone with dark waxed foliage, even in London these grow at alarming speeds. 

If one can hear the wings of a butterfly it was so, but if one cannot, it must have been a light bird that landed on my shoulder in the Isola di San Michele, an angel brought to me by the sea wind and the false exotic scent of imported pine trees, demarcation of cypress trees, and cage of tombs. 

Pine trees are found almost throughout Roman Italy (pine nuts were beloved by the Romans) however the true origin of the pine tree has remained a mystery, the only conclusion that has been drawn is that they are not native to Italy. 

The wings of a butterfly float, not fly. 

To counter the hidden enclosures of Granada I began to build the elements of my own garden, these elements roughly align to the primary Islamic elements, water, pomegranate, rose, jasmine. 

Composition 1:

Water I replaced with the view of the Sierra Nevada, pomegranate I replaced with the olive tree, rose I replaced with wild angelica, and jasmine I replaced with the yellow rape flower. 

The cicadas repentant hum permeates the forest of the dead, chimed with the hush of wings of invisible carriers of the diminishing souls, infused with the drone of a microphone. 

Composition 2:

River darro, fig tree, wisteria, wild rocket. 

A little fountain accidentally rings. Splash after splash hits the mental plate that holds the fountains spout, the noice breaking from the splash is similar to a tiny bell emerging from the water, this ring sent me into a dream of sorts, a dream a bell-fish as I initially thought a small bell must be attached to one of the goldfish in the pool, the bell ringing as it gently carved its watery path. A strange inversion of the bell fastened to a cat’s collar, the cat’s bell makes it visible, whereas the fish bell hides its keeper. This ringing fountain was in an alcove that I had been lost in before, a place that ushers the secret of itself. It is a small garden located in the Giardini della Biennale pavilion. I had been here before, I know this because in my previous visit I had understand the pool to be an artwork, seeing it again, preserving itself, unaware of the places of changes it existed within warmed me. I knew that no matter how many new artworks were housed in the vast building this garden alcove would forever remain the same, its essence would prevail, for it embodied the immediate sacrosanct natural of an enclosed garden. The enclosed garden is perhaps the first great spiritual endeavour of mankind. 

Composition 3:

Stray cat, judas tree, agave, red vetch. 

Bell-fish; the echoes of the altar bell return repeated on a night in Venice, who is safe with the bell-fish pirouetting on the cusp of midnight. For who does the bell-fish toll? 

Composition 4:

Virgin mary, orange tree, lilac salvia 

‘the grave has just spoken to us of ourselves’

Composition 5:

Church bells, mihrab, wild orchid, rosemary. 

Night is a world stabiliser by the unity of its timelessness. Timelessness can also be achieved by history’s more immutable quality; vastness. 

Composition 6:

Guitar busker, willow tree, ivy, fresh mint. 

“All of us have experience moments when the mind empty of thought, is filled with syllables which come to form a very ancient word with no relation to our life today, a word of which we were not thinking! These words are dreaming within us.” (Bachelard)

Composition 7:

Blue tiles, the space where the adhan should be, candles, artichokes. 

The stars have named themselves and in their light their names escape meaning, all light becoming analogous to darkness’s twin receptacle, those who choose us speak before our altar professing their indisputable non-being, a resistant non-being that contains the hidden meaning of being itself. 

Composition 8:

Blue sky, lemon tree, iris, carpobrotus edulis (freeway iceplant). 

If the first word was light, she was borne of darkness, no word need signify emptiness. If the prerequisite for light is darkness, then is the dream the prerequisite for waking? 

Composition 9:

Nude bather, grape vine, painted polychrome sculpture, red tulips.  

A derelict cemetery is anything but derelict, for in decay the cemetery becomes more potent, and when over time, less visitors walk the entablature corridors, and flowers remain unchanged or even gestating in their plastic wrappers, why take flowers to a grave and leave them in their plastic foil, price tag and name to be read and seen. The cemetery requires no living visitors, it has by its own merit inherent inhabitants, and the life of the cemetery when left to rot slowly shifts into an established natural state, in symbiosis with nature, generating its own ecosystem. 

“Already my solitude is prepared/ to burn him who burns it” (Emié) 

A Letter from the Protestant Cemetery in Rome: 

Dear, 

I found the grave entitled, “Here lies One/ Whose Name was writ in Water”. The unearthly naturalisation is reminiscent of Wordsworth’s title “lines left upon a seat in a yew-tree” (- Nay, Traveller! rest.) The cemetery’s gravity was so strong that upon entering the rain ceased, no other visitors, but the numerous stray cats I had read about were indeed there. Keats’s tomb is on the pyramid of Caius Cestius side, seated next to the grave of his ‘death-bed companion’ (what a noble title!) Joseph Severn, behind the two larger headstones is a tomb for Joseph Severn’s son. The three graves have a square plot, surrounding on three sides are irises (not in bloom but I was informed they are purple), the front patch is littered with self-seeding violets, between the two larger graves is a young lemon tree, and behind Keats’s grave is another young tree, a Japanese maple, thinking now the Canadian poet Bliss Carman requested in a poem that his grave tree be a ‘scarlet maple’: 

“Waiting till the Scarlet Hunter
Pass upon the endless trail.” 

Many Japanese maple trees never reach the altitude one would expect of trees, rather they remain autumn burning bushes, apparently the elder tree was cursed after Judas choose to hang himself from one of their branches thus forever remaining ‘neither bush nor tree’. The Japanese maples slight stature does however make it a good grave side companion, they bring the drama of a microcosm as even in their ‘bush stages’ they so strongly resemble a full-grown tree, as of course they archaic portrayal of the seasons renders time as a circumference, a peaceful thought for any mourner. 

Other grave side companions: 

Ornamental orange trees

Pomegranate shrubs 

Box hedges 

Grape vines 

Green hydrangeas

Short fan palms 

Jasmine (one specimen was delicately wrapped around its grave as if grasping it)

The graveyard itself was planted with pine trees, cypress, and bay laurel, ivy and a smattering of white wildflowers acted as ground cover. It was the most perfect garden. The little rain had drawn all the dormant odours from the pine needles and littered bay leaves, it was pure petrichor. 

I stayed until closing time (5:30pm for ref). In the 15 minutes before closing, I was hurriedly trying to find Shelley (he’s in a tucked away corner) when perhaps the most miraculous apparition I’ve experienced occurred. Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, Act II came onto the loudspeakers, followed by the instruction to exit the cemetery first in Italian, then French, German, and English. All the elements came into divine unison. Sweat mingled with rain, fragrance revived sound, charred pomegranate fruits, moth eaten cats, and slabs of stone. The cemetery is such a perfect garden, so perfect that is it instead a vase. 

Yours, 

P.S.

The Roman reds are not comparable to the reds of the British Isles, the red geranium in the Italian ‘fioriera’ is an ecstatic grenade and the red roses that furnish the roundabout fountain gush a scarlet that is inconceivable to my uninitiated retina. However, the greatest of all these reds must be the common poppy that lines the railway lines throughout the city in May, they mimic iron’s rust in their sun-stained paper crinkles, I believe poppies are one of the few flowers that find equal poetry in the swarming mass and the single unexpected/ defiant sprig. 

At closing time, the loudspeakers that proliferated the cemetery island spat and crackled, after a metallic scream came the shout of man, the only discernible word: PARTIRE, leave.