Off to the Isola di San Michele and Il Cimitero. The island, which consists only of the Cemetery of San Michele and its church, is located just northeast of Venice. At one time, the dead were carried from the city to the island in black funeral gondolas, decorated with gold-winged angels.

Stravinsky, Diaghilev, and Ezra Pound are buried there. Alas, the cemetery is now full, and Venice must send its dead to the mainland for burial.

An anti-Semite who hated American capitalism, he supported Fascism and Mussolini during the 1930's. From 1941 to 1943, he broadcast Fascist propaganda in English on Rome radio. The Italian partisans arrested him for treason in 1945 and imprisoned him in Pisa before deporting him to the United States for trial. While in Pisa, he allegedly declared that Hitler was a martyr comparable to Joan of Arc.

The Americans ruled that Pound was mentally unfit to plead to the charge of treason and incarcerated him in St Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington from 1946 to 1958. Upon his release, Pound returned to Italy.

Pound continued to write and publish during his incarcerations in Pisa and Washington and up to his death in Venice in 1972 at the age of 87.

Among the more famous and accessible of Pound's poems is "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley" written in 1921 when Pound lived in London. The fifth section begins:

There died a myriad,
And of the best, among them,
For an old bitch gone in the teeth,
For a botched civilization,

Charm, smiling at the good mouth,
quick eyes gone under earth's lid,

For two gross of broken statues,
For a few thousand battered books.

Pound was writing of the futility and stupidity of World War I, but similar dark thoughts occur when one contemplates the descent of Venice from a empire of great bankers and merchants to the petty chicanery of today's merchants of Venice.