In north-eastern Poland there are still pockets of Tatars, Islamic peoples of Turkic origin. The mosque in Bohoniki is a simple square of wooden planks painted green, with two porches and a cupola in the middle of the roof. It looks like a glorified rustic schoolhouse. Inside, it has a green wooden mimber, and red prayer-rugs, and wall-hangings with Arabic calligraphy: all the things you expect of a mosque, except that as far as the eye can see on all sides are flat fields of mown hay and yellow flowers, and it feels just as if you have stepped into Tolstoy’s Russia. Which in a sense you have – until World War One, this was indeed Russia, as the pre-1914 headstones in the cemetery testify. People come from the remaining Tatar communities all over the country to be buried here, but it’s not so Turkic that it seems ever to have adopted the Islamic Türbe, with a turban at the head of the headstone. Look more closely though, and the gravestones have crescents and stars, and little scrolls of Arabic calligraphy, side-by-side with inset photographs: what happened to the rule about graven images?

I

How to write about graveyards? Easiest would be to make this a comfortable literary tour. Let’s begin with Dickens’s London. Close to the beginning of Bleak House, a man who goes under the name of Nemo (‘no-one’) is found dead in dismal lodgings. Nobody knows anything about him, but he seems to have died of an over-dose of opium. He is bundled off to an inner-city cemetery:

a hemmed-in churchyard, pestiferous and obscene, whence malignant diseases are communicated to the bodies of our dear brothers and sisters who have not departed … Into a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would reject as a savage abomination, and a Caffre would shudder at, they bring our dear brother here departed, to receive Christian burial. With houses looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court gives access to the iron gate — with every villainy of life in action close on death, and every poisonous element of death in action close on life — here, they lower our dear brother down a foot or two: here, sow him in corruption, to be raised in corruption: an avenging ghost at many a sick-bedside: a shameful testimony to future ages, how civilisation and barbarism walked this boastful island together.

Bleak House was published between March 1852 and September 1853, and reflects anxieties, fuelled by outbreaks of epidemic diseases such as cholera, about the state of inner-city burial grounds. Edwin Chadwick’s Report into the Sanitary Conditions of the Labouring Population had been published ten years before, and Burial Acts in 1852 and 1855 were concerned with the creation of local Burial Boards in order to obtain new cemeteries for local use. Pay particular note to that shallow grave (‘down a foot or two’): it was thought that the danger to public health came from emanations of gases from the dead.

Contrast this with Gunter Grass’s Call of the Toad (Unkenrufe) a century and a half later. A German man meets a Polish lady in Gdańsk (formerly Danzig). He was born in the old German city of Danzig, her parents came from Wilno. He is an art historian, with a fine eye for armorial bearings and episcopal escutcheons; she is a specialist gilder who works on ecclesiastical art. He owns a ‘carefully catalogued collection of hand-forged coffin nails, acquired over his long years of researching Baroque tombstones in North German cemeteries’; she has trained in matte gilding and burnish gilding, in the use of gold leaf and ducat gold. They come up with the idea of purchasing cemeteries so that the dead, at least, can be repatriated to the places they considered home, the places they lost in the ‘Century of Expulsions’. Grass uses the art historian’s specialism to evoke nostalgia for the lost German city: the loving antiquarian details of the heraldry in Danzig’s old churches, the fine anatomical details of the skeletons in their relief carvings. But as the idea catches on, it becomes madly politicised in ways that the couple had never foreseen, and the cemetery theme also becomes a platform for satire. The satire is not so much on the sentimentality of the original idea as on the slogan-mongering of those who react to it (‘incorrigible revanchism’; ‘reconquest through corpses’; even ‘petty-bourgeois wishful thinking’); satire on the capitalism of the west and the xenophobia of the east.

In contrast to both of these, the cemetery in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain is not a call for public health reform, nor is it satire. It really is about death. The hero and his cousin befriend Karen Karstedt, one of the terminal patients in the sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. It is at a stage in Hans Castorp’s career when he is reacting against the ‘prevailing egotism’ of the sanatorium, and it also flatters his self-esteem to embark on a career of benevolence. The cousins take up with one patient after another, and eventually with Karen, whom they find particularly congenial; they take her to the ice-rink and the bob-sleigh run and the cinema, and they enjoy café society with exotic cocktails and a little orchestra. But Mann leaves it to the end to describe how their morning walks take them to the village cemetery, halfway up the hill, still under snow in early February:

The snow rounded over and built up each smooth and even elevation, with its cross of stone or metal, its small monument adorned with medallions and inscriptions. No soul was to be seen or heard, the quiet remoteness and peace of the spot seemed deep and unbroken in more than one sense. A little stone angel or cupid, finger on lip, a cap of snow askew on its head, stood among the bushes, and might have passed for the genius of the place — the genius of a silence so definite that it was less a negation than a refutation of speech … The three wandered for some time discreetly along the paths, among the enclosures, stopping to decipher a name or a date here or there. The tablets and crosses were modest affairs that must have cost but little. The inscriptions bore names from every quarter of the earth, they were in English, or Russian – or other Slavic tongues – also German, Portuguese, and more. The dates told their own sad story, for the time they covered was generally a short span indeed, the age between birth and death averaging not much more than twenty years. Not crabbed age, but youth peopled the spot; folk not yet settled in life, who from all corners of the earth had come together here to take up the horizontal for good and all.

The cousins study the inscriptions, and they study Karen studying the inscriptions. Karen is dying; her fingertips have running sores that will not heal; but she is not yet close enough to death to have started to deceive herself. She stands looking at the graves ‘with modest and shamefaced mien, her head bent on her shoulder, blinking her eyes and smiling a strained little smile.’

Unlike the previous two literary cemeteries, the Davos cemetery is real. I have been there, as I have been to other places mentioned in the novel—the hotel Schatzalp, with its famous bobsleigh run down which they used to send the corpses in winter, the waterfall Castorp visits with the elemental Mynheer Peeperkorn—to see what I could recapture of Mann’s century-old Davos. Alas, the cemetery appears to have been cleared at some point, and very few graves went back any earlier than the 1970s. The burials that went back to the earlier Twentieth Century were mostly family graves of very well-heeled and long-lived Swiss, not short-lived foreigners. Two drew the eye, however. One was the grave of a 25 year old Yugoslav woman who died in the 1940s, the only one in the cemetery with a portrait panel (she was pretty). The other was right up against the cemetery wall in the shade, a wooden cross with a Spanish name. Have I misremembered the detail that the dead man was a Mexican, or was he really? For Hans Castorp and his cousin also encounter a Mexican woman whom they dub ‘Tous les deux’ because tuberculosis has carried off both of her sons, one after the other, and these are almost the only words the woman is capable of uttering any more. The date of death on the wooden cross was 1917, nine years after Castorp visited the place. This was the closest that I came to Karen with her weeping fingertips.

II

I love cemeteries. One favourite pastime is simply languishing in literary connections, as above. But if I were writing a different kind of piece, I could assert — which is indeed true — that cemeteries are texts to be read; and could, were I minded to write a more scholarly (or trendy) article, translate any number of the casual observations I have made in graveyards into a more academic register.

Art history is an obvious place to start. Graveyards showcase almost every conceivable genre of art. From the riotous neo-folk woodcarving of the ‘Merry Cemetery’ of Sapanta in the Maramures (Romania) to the highly ornamental bronze plaques on the aged table-tombs of the St Johannis and St Roche cemeteries in Nuremberg, where Peter Vischer and his family were master bronze-founders and sculptors in the Renaissance (not to mention Dürer, who is buried in the Johannis Friedhof). With implications for patronage, politics, and elite self-display, cemetery art offers fields of study of limitless range and technicality. There is much to decode. Against the background of the politics of his day, the art historian in Grass’s novel wrote a doctoral dissertation offering an interpretation of ‘the three thistles and five roses in the bush-like coat-of-arms of seventeenth-century theologian Aegidius Strauch, taken from the bas-relief of a tombstone in the Church of the Holy Trinity’.

Quite apart from high Art, cemeteries also offer some of the most splendid celebrations of kitsch to be found anywhere. Perhaps the money-no-object architectural pastiches of northern Italy belong here. The wealthy of Lombardy and Piedmont evidently wanted to be remembered and judged by the success of their imitations of well-known brands and approved styles. (In Turin, there is a wonderful pastiche Etruscan bronze: a couple recline on a dais, their hair done into braids, wearing the secretive smiles characteristic of archaic art.) And at the opposite extreme, what’s wrong with celebrating unashamed bad taste? The name of Bragança in northern Portugal probably conjures up Catherine, wife of Charles II, so you imagine a place of faded grandeur. But if you explore the cemetery you come across a series of private family vaults with barely space to move between the lace-draped coffins for thickets of crystal trees and monstrous artificial blooms, satinised and gilt-edged. It all looks like the sort of thing you’d buy at a pound shop.

There are dozens of branches of social history. You could, as you wished, write a quiet and controlled, or an angry, narrative about differences between rich and poor. In his Pictures from Italy, Dickens describes how the poor are buried: 365 burial pits, one opened on each day of the year for those who die on that day (this system seems ubiquitous, from Genoa to Naples). They are heaped up during the day, and then piled in when the pit is opened during the night. On the other hand, he notes a ‘graceful new cemetery’ in Naples, with ‘meretricious and … fanciful’ tombs — for those who could afford them.

Conspicuous consumption of wealth on funerals is nothing new. Legislation about it goes back to antiquity. In a small village cemetery on Cyprus last Easter I was amazed by the colossal amount of white marble, packed so densely that you stuggled for a foothold among a jumble of masonry. ‘How much did this cost?’ you were supposed to think, as you scrambled from grave to grave across monstrous hunks of gleaming white. Of course, cemeteries are indices, not simply of wealth, but of cultural attitudes to expenditure, which are much more complicated: I learned recently that the cultural group who spend most on funerals and grave monuments are gypsies. Conversely, the increasing cultural preference for gardens of remembrance for the cremated dead, and still more for woodland burials, no longer demonstrates wealth like those Cypriot chunks of stone — let alone the soaring quasi-Gothic edifices of northern Italy.

Both groves of trees and Gothic cathedrals are pleasant places to be, however, and the transformation of cemeteries into places of resort belongs to the history of leisure. Evocative melancholy, connoisseurship, appraisal of taste, approval of good taste, and comfortable ecological righteousness, are variously available to the cemetery-goer. All this before we even consider time spent tending the graves themselves. This too seems a cultural variable: where in one country everything is safely padlocked at an implausibly early hour, in another, people are pottering about with watering cans deep into the twilight, and in Liverpool vandals are flattening everything in sight.

Cemeteries, or sections of cemeteries, devoted to particular cultural groups call for the ethnographer. The Jewish cemeteries of Poland are so evocative because they speak so clearly of historical tragedy, but the effect is enhanced because (in relatively well-preserved cemeteries like those of Warsaw or Krakow) there is so much there to read—all the more compelling because the idiom, both linguistic and iconographical, is unfamiliar. Go to Krakow’s Remuh cemetery and ponder the rich iconography of rampant animals and crowns and ewers and basins, and ask whether this symbolism still has live significance for some, or whether those who constructed these rich, wonderful texts have gone for ever.

Which leads on to language. I have no idea whether mortuary socio-linguistics exists as a field of study, but if it doesn’t, someone should invent it. Think back to those Tatars of northern Poland. Could any of them actually read the Arabic scrolls, or was their function more emblematic? What languages are preferred, and when? When did the Polish Jews use Yiddish, or Russian, or Hebrew, and do bilingual inscriptions convey subtly different messages in each language? What formulations are preferred, and when? When do people start imitating the form and phrasing of classical epitaphs? When do the middle- and upper-classes in their ancestral vaults inside churches use Latin, and when the vernacular?

And is the cheerful celebration of working-class taste in ‘You’ll never walk alone’ a purely recent phenomenon?

III

A graveyard is crowded with narratives. These narratives have something of the simplicity of Icelandic sagas. Though capable of endless permutation, there is only a small number of variables, the end of which is always death. All you need for a narrative are dates, and the narrative is enriched when several family members lie together. (How long did she outlive her husband? How old was she when her son died? Does that date there mean that she died a year later of a broken heart?) Some cemeteries are more informative than others. If the Swiss are minimalist, the Germans are sometimes more communicative; professions that stick for several generations within a family and then peter out suggest an unsung Buddenbrooks. The graves in the village cemetery in Oberammergau, Bavaria, give you a little cultural history of the place: soldiers decorated in the Franco-Prussian War, or who died on the Somme or in Russia, and a young man who died in a skiing accident in 1939 with the initials H[itler]J[ugend] after his name. Another inscription commemorates children who lived for two or three weeks in 1963, 1967, and one which died on the same day as it was born in 1994, all from the same family: suddenly you have a tragic narrative about some congenital birth defect that dogs a family across generations.

Narratives are supplemented by photographs, which are so much commoner in many continental cemeteries than they are here. For family and friends they preserve the person ‘as they were’, or fix memory in happier times. But for the stranger they simply do what all photography does – confirm the perishability of its subject-matter. This person lived and is no more. In some Polish cemeteries, the image is always rendered into black and white, or tinted brown, even where there was a colour original. It harmonises better with monochrome gravestones, but above all its sets the subject in the historic past. This is the visual equivalent of the Latin perfect fuit, meaning ‘he was’ (and is no longer).

Just before his empire fell, Tsar Nicholas II commissioned the photographer Prokudin-Gorskii to make a photographic survey of Russia, which he did in the years 1907–15 using a prodigiously early version of colour photography. The effect of these colour images today is shattering: a lost world that we half suspect only ever existed in monochrome suddenly becomes continuous with own. The effect of the black-and-white cemetery photography of eastern Europe is the negative of that: the recent past vanishes into ancient history.

Put enough of these narratives together as you wander around and you start to form an impressionistic idea of demographics. There is no particular surprise about the longevity of the orderly, well-heeled Austrians of the Tyrol, where 97 and 98 year-olds are hardly a thing of great wonder. Slightly more surprising is the longevity of the Polish peasants on the Belarussian border. Of course, every cemetery will turn up its quota of three-day-old babies and felled seventeen year-olds — the latter in conspicuous numbers in Greece, where one is inclined to blame the roads; if you see a kitsch shrine, it’s usually a teenage grave. But the gay colours of the Janivsky cemetery in Lvov on a sunny day in 2006, bright flowers and sashes from recent interments, crowded family monuments dotted with happy photographs — none of this could do anything to mask the desperate levels of mortality, whose inscribed record recalled a nineteenth-century industrial blackspot rather than a twenty-first century city on the edge of the EU.

Put the whole lot together and you get the history of a settlement, of a community. In a little cemetery in Ayia Napa, Cyprus, you can trace the place’s progress from little fishing village to sink resort in the space of a couple of decades. Throughout Cyprus, in fact, you can trace the changing patterns of British relations with the island. To begin with, missionaries and colonial administrators. In a little shelter round the back of Ayios Lazaros, Larnaka: ‘Sacred to the Memory of Helena Augusta Jane, The Infant Daughter of Niven Kerr Esquire, Her Britannic Majesty’s Consul For The Island, And Of Louisa Maria His Wife, Who Departed This Life The 3 Of July 1847, Aged 11 Months And 10 Days.’ (The mortality in summer months was dreadful.) But those left nowadays are ex-pats with pathetic dreams: ‘Till we are reunited on our sunshine island.’

For historical resonance, you can’t beat the Jewish cemeteries of eastern Europe. Those in Prague and Warsaw are well-known — but go further east. Go to Białystok, where an old Jewish cemetery backs onto a modern Catholic one in full swing. Go round the side, get beyond the undergrowth, and a wide open space opens out, full of gravestones. They are inscribed mostly in Hebrew, but with a large minority in Russian or in Russian–Hebrew bilingual, and a few in Yiddish. (WEINBERG in large Cyrillic lettering — the grave monument of a whole speech community.) Part of the cemetery, though not all, is overgrown to the height of the gravestones, but all of it is dead, bare of the bright artificial flowers and burning paraffin lamps and the colour that characterise the Catholics next door, barely recognisable as another form of Judaism. When the Jews were still here, was their cemetery ever so cheerful? Conversely, you wonder, how long would it take to reduce the Catholics to this?

A more typical narrative in the east of Poland involves a journey to a small flat in an ugly housing estate, where a very elderly couple are the custodians of the key. One of them may be in bed. One of them may be dying. You ask for the key, which they surrender unsmilingly, and then you go and unlock the gates of the cemetery, which is often on a hillock. Mostly it is overgrown and desolate, with a few broken slabs underfoot, but there are a few re-erected stones, and a few have pebbles on top holding down slips of paper, or a spiky set of metal railings. In Tykocin, whose Jews were shot in the woods outside the town on 25–26 August 1941, there is a museum-synagogue, with lovingly-displayed prayer-shawls, skulls caps, and Torah-cases, but outside, the mouldering graveyard is reverting to meadows and farmland. Curious, really, that uncared-for stone can be so impermanent, and rot like wood or teeth, leaving only disfigured humps and stumps behind.

IV

For death culture, Vienna and the heartlands of the Habsburg Empire reign supreme. It was Joseph II, at the end of the Eighteenth Century, who gave orders for the establishment of five new cemeteries outside the city-walls; but Joseph was never going to get anywhere with his further stipulations for mass graves and — in order to speed up decomposition — for the corpse to be dumped directly into the earth without a coffin. That one, in particular, foundered after only four months. But if you go to the Bestattungsmuseum in Vienna, you will see one of Joseph’s reusable coffins, and they will even give you a demonstration: a quick jerk on a metal bar at the foot, and the two wooden panels on the base come clattering apart, thus depositing the corpse directly in the earth leaving the plain, functional casket ready for its next occupant.

An unhappy piece of technology, clearly. But the Viennese were endlessly inventive when it came to death. To begin with, there was the unspeakable horror of live burial, which long haunted the European imagination. It stalks the stories of Edgar Allan Poe. The narrator of Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel, The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, describes how he watched while, in accordance with his dead father’s wishes, two doctors perforated the heart in order to ensure death. Imperial decrees stipulated a minimum time between death and burial, and prescribed an official inspection of a corpse; but it wasn’t enough. In 1828 Johann Nepomuk Peter constructed a ‘Rettungswecker’ (a ‘rescue alarm’) for the cemetery in Währing, where Beethoven and Schubert were originally buried. (It would, in fact, have been just in time for Schubert.) The alarm worked by connecting the corpse’s hand to a rope which, if jerked, released a mechanism that caused a bell to ring in the house of the gravedigger. It isn’t recorded whether it ever served its purpose, and it wouldn’t have been much good after the corpse was already in the ground, but as late as 1976 it was still installed in the house of the Währing gravedigger, and the Bestattungsmuseum now displays a replica, together with a helpful illustrated copy of the instructions (‘connect A to the hand of the corpse’ …).

More technology was available post-burial. To prevent a coffin caving in under the weight of earth, a Sargschützer — a thin half-cylinder of metal — was available from the turn of the Twentieth Century. It rested over the top of the coffin, like a seedling protector.

Finally, post-burial, the grave could be embellished in all sorts of ways. Přibram, in Bohemia, was the centre of an industry that turned out pearl wreaths — a very fine wire framework embellished with glass pearls in lace-effect floral patterns — to decorate the black laquered cast-iron crucifixes on the grave. A glass centre-piece would house photographs or a crucifix or an image of Jesus. For the elderly, a black version was available, for children a white or pale blue version with an angel as the central motif.

Joseph’s five new cemeteries served the city for most of the next century, but by the 1860s it was clear that something new was needed. In 1866 the Municipal Council resolved on the construction of a Zentralfriedhof in the suburb of Simmering, and this — the largest in Europe by the number of burials, and second largest after Hamburg in ground space — was opened in 1874. (The old fears wouldn’t die, and on 5 October 1874 the Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt published an account of the precautionary measures that had been taken in the new Todtenhalle to prevent live burial.) If you go to the Zentralfriedhof, the odds are that you’ll be going to the Ehrengräber. With its concentration of home-grown and imported musicians, it is a stunning showcase of Viennese Hochkultur. Yet it wasn’t until six years after the cemetery opened that the authorities seem to have had the idea of transferring the distinguished dead here, so you begin to wonder: was this simple showing off, or was it also a public-relations exercise to promote the new cemetery? In 1880 the Director of the Archives was commissioned to seek out the burial-places of the famous dead with a view to their transfer to Simmering, and the actual programme only got underway in 1885.

Schubert and Beethoven were brought from Währing in 1888. Schubert’s bones were in a bad way: a little man with a broad, low skull, whose dimensions were minutely documented. (Schubert’s own oeuvre is one of the supreme sources for the Viennese mythology of death, from boyhood romps in the best traditions of Schauerromantik, to mature works in which graveyards become the settings for visionary gravediggers and spectral epiphanies.) They had only twenty minutes for Beethoven, but noted that he was prognathous, and that his skull ‘in no respect corresponds to our conceptions of beauty and symmetry’. Gluck came two years later, in rather a pitiful condition (though there were still clumps of periwig), and others followed. The New York Times was disgusted: ‘The Viennese practice of embellishing the new Central Cemetery by disturbing the famous dead cannot be too stongly censured. It would have been far better not to allow Gluck’s grave at Matzleinsdorf Cemetery to fall into neglect than to pay him such a tardy and doubtful honour.’

The Zentralfriedhof, like any graveyard serving the upper classes of a prosperous late nineteenth-century city, has its share of fancy graves; but for the ultimate in ostentation, go to the monumental cemeteries of northern Italy, especially Milan and Turin and Genoa. Milan’s Cimitero Monumentale was opened in 1866, the year that the Viennese authorities first resolved on a Zentralfriedhof. To get there, you head from the centre to the Castello, and then continue north a little way. The architectural fancies and follies range from Masonic pyramids to 1950s efforts à la Coventry Cathedral. There are Byzantine chapels, soaring Gothic spires, baptisteries from the Florentine Renaissance, and an incised spiral like Trajan’s column, save that it tapers.

But for my money, what the cemetery does best are bronze casts and stone sculptures on graves that are not necessarily architectural. A sick girl lies propped up in bed, while more abstract shapes in a circular panel behind her head vaguely suggest a dream of angel wings. Wives hurl themselves face-down on the ground in grief-stricken abandon; a maiden in a shift kneels gazing heavenward in rapture (I got a particularly good picture of that one, with just the right amount of celestial light). Old Father Time with massive wings sits brooding, resting his sickle over the names of the Rancati family. Some characterise the deceased or their occupation: a smiling, friendly seventeen-year-old boy; a fallen soldier with his head wrenched to one side; a lady violinist with sleeves neatly gathered in at the wrists and elegant bowing technique. (This is also the cemetery where Toscanini is buried, together with Horowitz his son-in-law: over the lintel of this family vault is carved a sort of Viking longship supported on either side by stooping, winged females. I don’t really understand that one.)

V

This is the sentimental approach to death, which replaces reality with myth. The opposite approach insists on physicality. Some of the best instances are associated with certain religious orders.

The Camadolese of Lake Wigry in North East Poland inserted their dead into niches in a brick wall, like crematorium ovens, and then reopened them for show years later. The sight recalls the dry-bones apocalypse of the prophet Ezekiel: will tendons, flesh, and skin be re-attached to these brown remnants, and will breath be infused?

A thirteenth-century Abbot of the Cistercian monastery at Sedlec, Kutna Hora, in the Czech Republic, scattered the monastery cemetery with soil from the Holy Land, thus creating one of central Europe’s most desirable burial-sites. What you see there now is the handiwork of a nineteenth-century woodcarver with bags of macabre wit, who arranged the bones, not only into heaps, but into every conceivable kind of interior decoration. There are monstrances and coats of arms. Festoons of jawless skulls are slung across the vaulted ceiling. From the centre hangs a huge chandelier: bits of the sacrum down the central column look oddly like acanthus leaves, seven or eight skulls support sockets for lights, and there is a fringe of pendent femurs along the lower edges.

Of course this is leading up to the Capuchins. The Habsburgs are buried underneath the Capuchin church of St Mary of the Angels in Vienna. But continue north to the Moravian town of Brno, where the Capuchins discovered that the dry atmosphere of their crypt was a perfect agent of mummification. The bodies of the friars themselves lie full-length along the two long sides of one room, their heads propped up on a brick or two. They are just skin and bone, give or take the odd loin-cloth, cross, or rosary. Less minimalist treatment was accorded the local worthies who forked out considerable money to be buried here. They lie in Baroque coffins with glass lids, while an angel of thickset plaster moulding and cumbrous wings gesticulates at the message ‘Sic Transit Gloria Mundi’. Labels on the coffins provide narratives. The one I particularly remember (this from a visit in 1992) pointed out that a certain corpse seemed to have been buried alive, as you could infer from the fingertips, which had been lacerated scraping against the lid.

There is a Capuchin crypt in the church of Santa Maria della Concezione in Rome, with towers and wreaths and swags of bones, and cowled skeletons bowing forwards from their supports. But the best one, as everyone knows, is in Palermo. The earliest body here is that of a Friar who died in 1599, and now looks like a sad sack. The crypt’s heyday, judging from the dates on the displayed bodies, was the middle of the Nineteenth Century. It was closed in 1880 (I saw only one body — a woman’s — that was accompanied by a photograph), though the burials continue until the 1920s. The layout is an unevenly-bisected rectangle. There are separate sections for men and women, and separate sections for the professions. All along the walls, every inch is crowded with bodies, the men strung up with bamboo poles or wires, the women laid in horizontal niches. Many are named and labelled, some with dates of birth and death — sometimes to the hour — but individual difference is now collapsed into a uniformity of bone and bits of brown skin clinging to the cranium. Jaws are falling off, or have fallen: goodness, you wonder, does this still happen, and, when it does, does somebody come and decently tidy them away?

In returning to dust, they have faded to a uniform greyish-brown, and their clothes have faded along with them, apart from the odd dye that still catches the eye, a fine blue stripe, a raffish dressing-gown in pink or red. Skulls grin from pathetically frilly Jane Austen poke bonnets. A couple of better-preserved men from the 1850s look like Robert Schumann. At the end of your visit, you see specimens in glass coffins which have had the luxury of chemical embalming: a dignitary with reddish hair and fine features, who died about 1910, and one of the most famous of all mummies, the two-year-old Rosalia Lombardo, who died of a bronchial infection in 1920. She was preserved by a mysterious process whose secret the author took with him to the grave, but it left the soft tissues of her face looking like those of a sleeping full-faced infant. She has a bow in her hair and wavy kiss-curls across her forehead. They say that Lampedusa was brought here, although the truth seems to be that he was buried in the cemetery next door. Still, you look at the dusty rows of Sicilian dead and think that many of them shared the island with the Prince.

VI

Two possible endings.

One returns to grandeur, but with a sensibility different from anything we have seen so far. The world of the Habsburg monarchs of Spain was bleak and austere. The first king stepped down from the throne and built himself an annexe to a remote monastery. There he could gaze out over the countryside and view from his sick-bed the high altar where his remaining interests concentrated. His son replicated the plan elsewhere on a larger scale, but still with that same double vision: on the one hand, the endless, unforgiving landscape of the central Iberian plain, and on the other the elevation of the Host in the sanctuary next door. In the Escorial, straight after the royal chambers and the bed where Philip II died, there is the Pantheon of the Spanish Kings. It is set directly underneath the high altar of the basilica, so that masses said for the dead would go directly home. It is all black and dark red marble, with gold trimmings. But there is no natural light. Opposite the entrance is a black marble crucifix framed by black marble pillars. The sarcophagi, which rest on gilt paws, are also black. Few words are needed to describe a place so darkly magnificent: an emperor and more than one lineage of kings to the left, an empress and queens to the right. The staircase down to the Pantheon is long and dark. There are doors to right and left: behind one of them lies the ‘rotting room’. But there is no emphasis on the macabre. The kings of Spain lie in a space where the austere personal tastes of the monarchs meet the Counter Reformation – dark, rich, and grim.

The other possible ending is quite different. It describes a contemporary cemetery in northern England. It is in a semi-rural area and feels spacious, with a duck-pond and a section for woodland burials. It is pleasant, but not at all grand, for the cemetery regulations restrict all memorials to a certain height and width. Very few of the gravestones stand out. Most are polished granite with gold lettering arranged by computer and incised by machine: very ordinary. Yet this one is special because it is where we buried my father earlier this year. For me, cemeteries offer a rich text which engages both intellect and imagination, but part of their power has always been the unimaginability of what lies beneath the surface.

We saw my father in his coffin the day before the funeral, just as he would be when he went beneath the earth. So now the relationship has changed, because now I know just what lies below.