Isola di San Michele

This guide to Isola di San Michele in Venice tells how the city solved a nineteenth-century burial crisis by moving its dead to this marshy island on Napoleon's orders, and how most graves here are only rented, dug up after twelve years to make room for the next arrival. It follows the black gondola funerals that still cross the water for every burial, and the handful of residents, among them Igor Stravinsky and Sergei Diaghilev, who were allowed to break that rule for good.