Venice 2007: The San Michele Cimitere

For a holiday respite, I devoted my Friday posts through December and January to recounting a trip I took to Venice in 2007. Using photos and notes from the trip, I highlighted the urbanist issues of day-to-day life in perhaps the most famous car-free city in the world.

I reached the end of January without exhausting the stories and insights that I’d hoped to share.  Venice is too fascinating to leave with tales untold, so I’ve continued with occasional Friday posts into February and beyond.  Today will be another of those extra posts.

In the history of this blog, I’ve mentioned cemeteries exactly one time.  But the subject may have found resonance with the readers.  The mention was in a comparison of Savannah and Charleston.  After earlier posts which balanced the two cities on elements such as restaurants and parks, I tried to sum up the comparison by deciding in which city I’d prefer to live.  I came down in favor of Savannah for several reasons, one of which was the way they embraced their cemeteries, acknowledging the circle of life.

I was comfortable in my conclusions, but expected the post to quickly slip beneath the waves of the constantly churning internet.  I was wrong.  Slightly more than a year later, barely a week goes by without another twenty to thirty people reading that post.  By total readership, it’s the most popular post I’ve ever written, by a factor of more than two.

I don’t know what draws people to that post.  It might be Savannah residents pleased that I gave the nod to their fair city.  It might be Charleston residents astonished that I could cast aspersions on their racial progress.  Or perhaps the reference to Savannah cemeteries was the key factor.

In any case, it seemed appropriate to check if the cemetery reference was key by writing about the Venetian cemetery.  Plus, the San Michele Cimitere is worth writing about.

For many years, Venetians buried their dead beneath the paving stones of their courtyards and pedestrian ways.  I recall one particular courtyard where an estimated 25,000 plague victims had been buried, but most of the burials elsewhere in the city were unmarked.  (That practice must add a little spice to the life of contemporary utility workers.  Every shovelful of dirt for a utility trench offers a possible surprise.)

In the early 19th century, a Venetian doge finally decided that downtown burials were a bad idea.  He directed that all future burials would be on the small island of San Michele, between Venice and the glass-making island of Murano.

It was a reasonable decision.  San Michele already had a chapel and a small graveyard.  Expansion was a reasonable course.  And likely profitable to the family that owned San Michele.

The vaporetto to Murano makes a scheduled stop at the San Michele dock.  I hadn’t necessarily planned on visiting San Michele, but while traveling to Murano one day made the abrupt decision to disembark for a look around.

It was a good decision.  San Michele is a tidy little cemetery, tightly oriented and well-maintained.  I can’t think of a single U.S. cemetery that projects quite the sense of order of San Michele.  It offers a number of settings, from enclosed gardens to broader expanses.  And several of the chapels provide colonnades to help slake my insatiable need for more colonnade photography.

 In a model seen more often in Europe than in the U.S., there are too few plots at San Michele to meet the demand from Venice.  So most plots aren’t sold, but are instead rented for twelve years, after which the remains are relocated to a cemetery on the mainland.

Within the U.S., I know some New Orleans cemeteries follow a similar model, although they rent for the shorter period of seven years.  Here in California, the concept of moving remains may seem macabre, but it’s a reasonable strategy in a place with little land area and a long history.

I have a couple of anecdotes to share from my time wandering about San Michele.  In a far corner, I came across the grave of Sergei Diaghilev, the Russian impresario who first introduced Russian ballet to the western world.  I didn’t know that he’d been buried in Venice and was pleased to have found his gravel by chance.

I was even more pleased to see that he hadn’t been forgotten.  Decorating his grave were tokens left by other visitors, used ballet slippers, ballet programs, and tickets from recent ballet performances.

I’ve seen similar tributes at the graves of sports figures, such as Joe DiMaggio’s grave in Colma, but it was my first time to see a similar reaction to someone in the arts.  Especially when Diaghilev has been gone for 85 years.  In a world where many of us will be forgotten 85 days after we’re gone, it’s good to see that some fame is more long-lasting,

As I neared the end of my visit, I came across a custodian who was locking up a chapel.  To my surprise, he

was wearing a San Francisco Giants ballcap.  It was worn and frayed, but still clearly a baseball cap.  Being a baseball fan, I was intrigued to learn how a Giants cap ended up on the head of an elderly, stooped custodian in a Venetian cemetery.

But I feared that he would have little English, so kept my words to a minimum.  After wishing him a good day in one of my few Italian phrases, I pointed to the cap and asked “San Francisco Giants?”  He looked back impassively.

Thinking that Barry Bonds might be too recent and too controversial, I went further back in my next effort “Willie Mays?”  Still nothing.

Going for an Italian connection, I tried “Joe DiMaggio?”  There was no Giant connection, but the San Francisco tie was strong.  Nonetheless, there was still no reaction.

So I rolled out my final effort, a true incendiary subject for many Giants fans, but with an impeccable Italian tie.  “Tommy Lasorda?”  Still an impassive stare.

I wished him a good day and headed back to the vaporetto stop, resigned to never knowing how the cap found its way to Venice.  I only hope that the custodian got a good laugh of his wife that evening when he told her about the demented American tourist.

San Michele may not have the proximity to Venice that the Colonial Cemetery has to downtown Savannah, but having a regular vaporetto stop that serves only the cemetery may make it even more a part of everyday life.  As in so many things, Venice had responded to its unique setting with urban solutions that feel right.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Savannah versus Charleston: Reaching a Conclusion

Over the past few months, I’ve offered comparative assessments of Savannah and Charleston, both of which my wife and I visited late last summer.  As I noted when I began the series, the Low Country locals regularly compare the two cities, so why shouldn’t visitors do the same?

I’ve compared streets (advantage Savannah), parks (advantage Savannah), tourism (a tie), downtown shopping districts (advantage Charleston), and restaurants (no opinion because I’m unqualified to judge). 

And now it’s time to reach a conclusion.  Often during my career, when advising clients, I’d ask myself what advice I’d want if I were the client.  The question served as a reminder of the difference between what would be good for the client and what would be good for my firm.  A similar test works here.  If I had to pick one city in which to live, which would it be?

Based on the comparative results above, perhaps you’d expect an edge to Savannah.  In fact, for three reasons that weren’t even obvious to me until I posed the question, it’s Savannah by a large margin.  I’ll summarize the three key decision points:

Race relations: On my first full day in Savannah, I had lunch with a friend who is a professor at a local state college.  Savannah has two state colleges, which seemed unusual for a city of Savannah’s size.  So I asked my friend about the history.

He offered a simple answer, “Because you’re now in the South.”  I assumed he was referring to parochial politics, so I nodded my understanding.  But my nod may have been hesitant because the west coast can also be subject to less-than-enlightened politics.

My friend presumably noticed my lack of conviction, because he quickly dropped the other shoe.  “One was originally a black college and the other one white.”  Ahhh, he was right.  I hadn’t yet grasped what it meant to be in the South.

Within my lifetime, laudable progress has been made on race relations, although much still remains to be completed.  And that’s particularly true in the South.  But between Savannah and Charleston, I felt more comfortable than Savannah would make the needed progress.

I chatted with several African-Americans during my days in Savannah.  My sense was they were on the track to equality.  There was still much to be done and many ways in which the process could and should be accelerated, but at least their feet were on the right path.

Charleston didn’t give me the same feeling.  For one, many Charleston residents describe the local African-Americans as Gullahs, which represents a particular path from Africa to the Low Country via the Caribbean.  They further note that the ancestors of the Charleston Gullahs arrived in the 1870s, thereby removing the possibility that “their” Gullahs had any heritage in American slavery.  It’s a history that seemed both dubious and self-serving.

Furthermore, the attitude toward African-Americans seemed gratingly paternal.  One Charlestonian noted that many Gullahs had been encouraged to move from servants’ quarters in Charleston mansions into public housing.  He suggested that the African-Americans may have been better off when they had white property owners to look out for their best interests.

And I found it offensive that African-American women weave baskets at the entry to Charleston’s City Market, on the front steps of the Daughters of the Confederacy Museum.

There is racial progress to be made in both cities, but Savannah seems more likely to make the needed in an expedient and efficient manner.

Literature: Savannah strongly identifies with the book “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil”.  The volume is generally known around town simply as “the book”.  I’m sure few Savannah residents live lives comparable to those described in the book.  But the book depicts some of the duality of living in a town in which the past remains hovering in the next room.  It paints a picture of Savannah in which many can find elements of truth.

A friend suggested that “South of Broad” by Pat Conroy might be the equivalent book for Charleston.   Not even close.  “South of Broad” is an over-wrought, soap opera of a book.  I may have devoured it in a few days, but that’s more of a character flaw than a recommendation of literary merit.

Savannah has the better book, by far.

Circle of Life: I don’t consider downtown cemeteries to be essential components of urban life.  Indeed, they probably inhibit urban walkability and vitality.  (No bad joke intended.)

But the nearby presence of cemeteries gives a sense of the circle of life and offers a reminder that we’re only passing through.  They remind us that we remain connected to our past.  Savannah includes Colonial Cemetery on the edge of downtown and Bonaventure Cemetery, which is a short drive away but is often present in the Savannah consciousness due to “the book”.

And Savannah residents have a connection to their cemeteries, whether it’s the maudlin statue of Gracie, an innkeepers’ daughter who died at a young age, or prolific songwriter Johnny Mercer, who was born in Savannah, retained lifelong ties to the community, and was buried in Bonaventure Cemetery next to a bench listing his most successful songs.

The closest equivalent in Charleston is a story about how the Confederacy exhumed and relocated the remains of John C. Calhoun during the Civil War to prevent the Union Army from desecrating the body.  (The remains were returned to Charleston after the war.)  It was an interesting story, but lacked the daily presence of the Savannah cemeteries.

Ultimately, it feels like Savannah is living a continuation of its past, with both the highlights and the warts.  Meanwhile, Charleston has put its past under glass, but only after some creative editing.

And so, if I had to pick one city in which to live, it’d be Savannah.  There is still much to recommend Charleston.  If I was a Savannah resident, I’d look for opportunities to spend weekends in Charleston.  But I would expect daily life in Savannah to feel like a real life, not a bit of make-believe.

Meanwhile, I still prefer living in the North Bay to either.  But there are lessons from the Low Country that can be applied to any city, including those in the North Bay.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)