Three years ago, with the East Anglian sky a transparent spring blue, we buried my father and his cardboard coffin in the Rosary cemetery in Norwich. His prudent non-Conformist ancestors bought several plots when the Rosary opened in 1821 as England's first non-denominational, private cemetery, and put up a tomb in undistinguished Victorian Gothic behind cast-iron railings. Inside the family dead lie on shelves, and in the grass around the tomb are their headstones, inclining slightly to the horizontal, sinking inexorably into the clay. Next to the tomb was an empty plot with a soft grass path, close under the trees, guarded by daffodils and celandines. There my father went, deep enough for my mother, in time, to lie on top. It is, as Marvell says, a fine and private place, conforming as closely as a town graveyard can to the pastoral ideal that the British seek in death as fervently as in life. The sounds of the city scarcely reach the cemetery, although, as my brother pointed out, it is near enough to Carrow Road that when the Canaries score, the sparrows of the Rosary, if not its dead, can hear the singing.
Where will we go, my father's four children and nine grandchildren, in three countries and on two continents? In Italy, where the ground heaves with the dead of millennia, the pastoral was never much in vogue. Indeed, until Mussolini wrested control of the Italian dead from the Catholic church in the 1930s, most ordinary people, with no tomba di famiglia or church monument, had no memorial at all, and no record of their existence survived outside the dust and paper of the municipal archive.
In Italy, though cremation was forbidden by the church until recently and is still only available in large cities, it has always been the soul and not the body that mattered. Italy's cemeteries have burying grounds where the newly dead are put in the earth, each coffin indicated by a name and a simple wooden cross. Ten years to the day, in a largely bureaucratic operation, the bones are dug up again. If there are still remains of the body, then the whole will be reburied for another five years. In the past, and still for the poor or uninterested, the bones were then compacted and transferred to the ossaio, the communal charnel house where they will lie for eternity, crumbling to dust with their erstwhile neighbours, enemies and friends.
When, with fascism, ordinary people were given the chance of tombs, municipal cemeteries came to resemble the towns and streets in which Italians live. Around the suburban edges are crammed the tombe di famiglia, separate villas, some with gates and rooms. On the ground, like the better sort of town house, are flat tombs in marble with crosses and gravel surrounds. All around where there is any space are the walls of loculi or loculini, flat marble slabs, one, half or a quarter-metre square, banked up like flats. There is little grass and there are few trees; it is a determinedly urban model, with all mod cons. You pay for it too, in an annual tax calculated according to the metri quadrati of your tomb or loculo, just like the hated Ici, or council tax, that Berlusconi famously promised to abolish during the election campaign. Electric light, used to power the eternal flames that decorate most memorials, is extra, and when the bulbs go you have to replace them yourself.
A recent survey showed that Italians spend more time cleaning their homes than any other Europeans, and their loculi have the same proudly scrubbed look. Each is adorned with an oval framed portrait of its occupant, two or three for the larger sizes. Here are the lovely old-fashioned Italian names of the turn of the century; here is Gilda, married to Oreste, there, next door, are Ida (one of many Idas), Serafino, Iolanda and Aurelio, and there, a few floors below, is Italia, born a decade after Italy was unified. Flowers cover the rest of the flat fronts of the loculi, drawing water from brass flower vases riveted to the marble surface, or planted in small concrete troughs like those we use to grow geraniums on our balconies. How respectable these owner-occupiers look in their sepia photographs, how long-lived they were, with their artichokes, oranges and hearty winter soups, and how devotedly their children and grandchildren attend them, standing on ladders to change the flowers, polish up the lettering and dust the glass domes of their flickering flames.
I'm not sure this would suit me, tempting though it may be to impose on my children the duty of keeping my loculo clean and sparkling. There is an alternative, though, and one that requires no annual payments: the Protestant cemetery, founded in 1827 by the prosperous Swiss community just outside the city walls of Florence, not far from my house. It is run-down now, and encircled by a busy road, but in among the tombs of Swiss chocolatiers who ran the city's coffee shops, among English bankers and American preachers stand the ugly sarcophagus of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, perched above the ground on six fat columns, and the more modest tomb of Arthur Hugh Clough. Closed in 1877, the cemetery recently reopened, and the custodian tells me there is a bit of space left. She says I am too young to book now, but I like the idea. It's got to be better than Golders Green, and if my children can dodge the traffic, they might even pay me the occasional visit.
