Isola di San Michele

The casual tourist can "do" Venice in about a day and a half. The artistic tourist can take months. One of the best-kept secrets about Venice is one of its cemeteries, the island of San Michele.

Just a boat ride away, it is a sequestered, quiet refuge from Venice, if not the rest of Europe. Automobiles, as in Venice proper, are completely absent. It has a wall, but I couldn't tell if it was to keep the living out or the dead in.

It has a church, Cappella Emiliana, built by Guglielmo de’ Grigi d’Alzano between 1528 and 1543. The interior has 37 types of colored marble. It also has a stunning collection of sculpted reliefs by Giovanni Battista Carona, in perpetual maintenance.

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.

Perhaps it's always like this, but when I visited, my small party of two 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.

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. You are there--just you and the dead. And the monk.

Quiet usually means the absence of noise. It is a negative. 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 beatified.

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. They simply don't exist. If you speak out loud, it's as if you're shushed cosmically and immediately. It seems a violation. A desecration of the dead. Christian Doppler must have been ready to watch waves of light and sound drop to the still ground, instead of their persistent spreading out over our lives.

If you go to Isola di San Michele, you'll get it. You'll bask in the silence that comforts like sanctifying grace.