Cimitero degli inglesi, Florence

The English Cemetery is a hillside burial ground enclosed within the oval island of Piazzale Donatello. Its familiar name reflects the many British and American Protestants laid here, although the institution belongs to the Swiss Evangelical Reformed Church and also received Swiss, Scandinavian, Russian, and Greek Christians. The site began in 1827 as an international Protestant cemetery, with its early layout designed by Carlo Reishammer.

Giuseppe Poggi later reshaped it into the oval form you see today when Florence became Italy’s capital in 1865. Follow the gravel paths with your eyes to the column rising from the mound: Frederick William IV of Prussia gave it in 1858, and it marks the meeting point of the principal paths. The inscriptions across the tombs use Hebrew, Greek, Cyrillic, Fraktur, and Roman scripts, alongside languages including Russian, French, German, Danish, Romansh, and English.

Among those buried here is Elizabeth Barrett Browning, whose tomb was designed by Frederic, Lord Leighton. Emily Dickinson kept a photograph of that tomb and drew inspiration from it for “The soul selects her own society.” The cemetery also helped inspire Arnold Böcklin’s painting The Isle of the Dead, later used by Sergei Rachmaninoff for his Op. 29.