There's something ironic about the fact that the poet Joseph Brodsky is buried there, facing the city in which he was always to be found, though forever just passing through. Perhaps he would have preferred a sepulcher far from Venice. When you come down to it, the city was, for him, a "plan B" or, to use a more literary metaphor, an Ithaca whose attraction consisted of being an always distant, imagined place. What's more, Brodsky once stated in an interview that he wanted to be buried in the Massachusetts woods; or perhaps the right thing would have been to return the body to his native St. Petersburg. But I suppose there's no sense in speculating about a person's last wishes. If will and life are two things impossible to separate, so are death and chance.
It's not easy to find Joseph Brodsky's grave there. Unlike many cemeteries in Europe, San Michele isn't a center of necro-intellectual tourism and so there are no guides or detailed maps, much less a list of the coordinates of its famous dead, like those at, for example, the entrances of Montparnasse and Pere Lachaise. Other well-known people - Ezra Pound, Luchino Visconti, Igor Stravinsky, Sergei Diaghilev - are to be found in San Michele, but the location of their graves is only marked by a scarcely visible sign opposite the small, separate section where their remains lie. If you don't know that the notable foreigners are separated from the ordinary Venetians, you can spend hours wandering around between the Antoninos, Marcelinos, and Francescos, without realizing that you'll never find echoes of The Cantos or reverberations of The Rite of Spring.
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