Death in Venice

Abstract

In my biographical sketch of Doppler published in 1988 I was able to present very little information on the last months of his life in Venice except to establish beyond all doubt, from the entry of death in the records of the municipal archives, the fact that he did die there. In an “epilogue” in this book I raised more questions than I had answered. Although the records of death established that he had died in the parish of San Giovanni in Bragora (St. John in the Swamp), I had been unable to locate the house. Neither could I, despite several days spent searching through the beautiful cemetery on the Island of St. Michael, find Doppler’s gravestone, nor even the stone tablet that had been erected in his memory by the physicists of Venice following his death in 1853. I incorrectly attributed a completely illegible tablet of deceptively similar design (since shown to be a memorial to the Famiglia Marseille) as being the remains of the Doppler memorial, and raised strong doubts as to whether Doppler was actually buried in Venice. “These questions remain unanswered”, I wrote then, “and the truth is — whether in Venice or elsewhere — we do not know where Christian Doppler’s grave is. The author has not yet given up the search.”