Isola di San Michele

The casual tourist can "do" Venice in about a day and a half. The serious, artistic tourist can take months. And for the citizen, it takes a lifetime. One of the best-kept secrets about Venice is one of its cemeteries, the island of San Michele, viz., Isola di San Michele.

Just a Venetian boat ride away, it is a sequestered, quiet refuge from Venice, if not the rest of Europe. Automobiles, as in Venice proper, are absent. This already begins the strange silence seldom encountered today. San Michele has a wall, but I couldn't tell if it was to keep the living out or keep the dead in—privileged and protected.

It has a church, Cappella Emiliana, built by Guglielmo de’ Grigi d’Alzano between 1528 and 1543. Its interior has 37 types of colored marble. It also has a stunning collection of sculpted reliefs by Giovanni Battista Carona, in perpetual maintenance due to the persistent ravages of the Adriatic air that creeps over the walls.

It is a burial place of honor, with many artists, scientists, and military heroes having tombstones there. One in particular is an Austrian mathemetician named Christian Doppler (1803–1853), who died in Venice at the age of 49 of a pulmonary illness. Christian Doppler is the very Doppler of "Doppler effect" fame. He had described how the propagation of waves—both light and sound—spread or coalesce, depending on whether objects are coming toward you or away from you.

Perhaps it's always like this, but when I visited, the two of us in our small party were the only visitors there. We went into the church and were met by a silent monk who only watched my wife and me with suspicion. We pressed on, regardless. He stood witness to our movements, perhaps ready to intervene were any indiscretions to threaten the sanctity of the consecrated structure.

What struck me was the overwhelming silence of the entire small island. You can turn around 360 degrees and see all of its shored perimeter, including its wall. This in no small way contributed to the silence, blocking the very sound of the waves of the sea.

When you find yourself in San Michele, you are there—just you and the dead.

And the supercilious, super-serious monk.

Quiet usually means the absence of noise. It is a negative concept. On San Michele, quiet is a positive experience. It is a thing. It is part of the island as much as the dew or breezes or the saltwater olfactory ambiance from the Adriatic, wafting over the walls.

It is what holy sounds like. Silence is beautiful. It is beatification. It swaddles.

Back to Christian Doppler: he demonstrated how an observed frequency of sound waves is affected by the relative motion of the source and the detector. Approaching sirens are higher-pitched—coming, and lower-pitched—going, when they spread out away from you instead of bunching up on approach. For light waves, it gives astronomers their redshifts and blueshifts, distinguishing between objects moving away or toward Earth, respectively; or the speed of their moving away according to the measurement of redshift.

The irony of Dr. Doppler's grave being on San Michele Island is that sound waves don't spread out there. Listen! They simply don't exist. If you speak out loud, it's as if you're shushed cosmically and immediately. Sound is disturbing. It seems a violation, a desecration of the dead. Christian Doppler is entombed in the grounds of San Michele, ready to watch waves of light and sound drop to the still ground, instead of their persistent spreading out over our lives. For him, light and sound are finished, complete, and their totality stacked and summarized, incarnate.

If you go to Isola di San Michele, you'll get it. You'll bask in the silence that comforts like sanctifying grace, which has no waves. It just is.