Cemeteries peaceful sightseeing locations

Call me morbid, but somehow I often end up sightseeing in cemeteries.

Not just any cemetery. I head to graveyards laden with history and the tombs of famous people. They’re places that make me reflect on a society’s past, and, of course, they’re usually very quiet places to stroll.

In Italy, I’ve wandered among Etruscan burial grounds where 2,000-year-old tombs are carved deep into cliffs.

In Cairo, I walked into a centuries-old cemetery where homeless Egyptians now shelter in stone mausoleums, living among the dead.

In London, I explored Highgate cemetery, a spookily romantic tangle of trailing vines, toppled headstones and dank 19th-century tombs that look like the set of a horror film. I couldn’t stop glancing nervously over my shoulder, having seen too many vampire films in my youth (including some filmed at Highgate).

In Paris, the sprawling Père-Lachaise cemetery, a verdant 109-acre swath in a densely urban neighborhood, is treated almost like a park, a wooded place to walk while paying homage to the dead.

I visited Père-Lachaise, named after a prominent 17th-century priest, on a recent sultry, thunder-clouded day. It’s a maze of densely packed graves, with an estimated 70,000 plots, that has been the burial site of the wealthy and successful, French and foreign, since 1804.

The cemetery is a miniature city of the dead spread across a hillside overlooking central Paris. Cobbled roads and dirt paths wind among above-ground stone tombs where whole families are interred. Some tombs look almost like somber playhouses, with peaked roofs and little gates. Other graves are simpler, individual resting places, marked just with headstones.

In the cloying heat of the summer afternoon, elderly Frenchwomen sat fanning themselves on benches, the miles of tombs that stretched around them a surreal backdrop for their chitchat.

A multinational trickle of tourists fanned out in search of the graves of the famous, from Polish composer Frederic Chopin and French writer Marcel Proust to Irish dramatist Oscar Wilde and American rock star Jim Morrison. Other tourists headed to sobering memorials to French revolutionaries and war dead.

The grave of Morrison, the lead singer of the Doors who died in Paris in 1971, is one of the most visited in the cemetery. Morrison’s simple rock headstone, bearing a plaque with his name, is wedged among other graves.

For years, fans made rowdy pilgrimages to the grave, partying and leaving graffiti and wine bottles in their wake. A fence now surrounds it and a sharp-eyed security guard is stationed there. Nowadays, fans just take photos and leave flowers.

I headed off in search of the grave of another musician, Chopin, who died in 1849 in Paris. I had a map of the cemetery, bought at a newsstand by the Père-Lachaise gate for a few dollars, with graves of the famous marked. Still, I got lost on lonely paths that twisted through a thicket of tombs.

Finally finding Chopin, I stood before his flower-strewn gravestone. Young couples, perhaps from his native Poland, laid more flowers upon his grave, with one bouquet wrapped in Chopin sheet music.

The sky turned ominously dark. Fat raindrops spattered down, faster and faster. My cemetery map turned soggy. I gave up on it and just walked where the spirits took me.

I came across the grave of Colette, an early-20th-century French novelist and feminist, who in death, and much of her life, went by one name and strewed scandal in her wake.

As the rain became a downpour, I sheltered under a tree. Beside me was the family tomb of neo-Impressionist artist Georges Seurat. I’d been admiring his 19th-century paintings the day before in a Paris museum. Now I’d stumbled across his grave, a gated tomb where he was buried with a half-dozen family members.

Somehow, seeing the burial site of this painter, who died so young at 31, brought things full circle and made him more vivid in my mind.

That’s the pleasing paradox of visiting cemeteries: Walking among the dead brings the past alive.