In January 1996, Joseph Brodsky passed away. He was buried in one of his favorite cities — Venice, in the old cemetery on the island of San Michele.

Why was Brodsky buried specifically in Venice, and not in New York, where he died, or in his homeland of Saint Petersburg — proposals like these were made, and the poet himself once wrote, "I will come to die on Vasilievsky Island." Several factors came together here.

First, Brodsky loved Venice very much. He often visited this city, which reminded him of his native Leningrad.

“If reincarnation exists, I would like to live my next life in Venice — to be a cat there, anything, even a rat, but definitely in Venice,” Brodsky wrote.

“Venice as a whole is a work of art; there you especially clearly understand that what is created by human hands can be much more beautiful than the human being himself.”

“Around 1970, I had a real idée fixe — I dreamed of getting to Venice. Imagining how I would move there, rent an entire floor in an old palazzo on the canal bank, sit there and write, and throw cigarette butts straight into the water and listen to how they hiss... And when I ran out of money, I would go to a shop, buy the cheapest food with the remaining coins — feast for the last time, and then blow my brains out.”

Secondly, his only official wife was an Italian, Maria Sozzani. Thirdly, after Brodsky’s death, one of his friends recalled such verses and saw in them a testament about the place of burial:

Although the insensible body

Is equally destined to decay everywhere, —

Deprived of native clay,

It would not mind rotting in the alluvium of the valley

Of Lombardy, — since

The same soil and the same worms remain.

Stravinsky sleeps on San Michele,

Having removed his historic beret...

Now on San Michele sleeps the great Russian poet himself. On June 21, 1997, the reburial of Joseph Brodsky’s body took place. Brodsky was neither Orthodox nor Catholic. Therefore, he was buried in the Protestant section of the cemetery. The epitaph on Brodsky’s grave reads: “Not all ends with death” (from Propertius’ elegy Letum non omnia finit).

Sources:

https://dzen.ru/a/X8InjWPVdAQVwRSR

https://joseph-brodskiy.livejournal.com/20012.html