The most visited necropolis in the world is the Père-Lachaise Cemetery. It brings 3.5 million visitors a year, and it is a wonder. The layout is maze-like, with bodies upon bodies memorialized in stone sepulchres. There are paths to find various memorials and graves, but they wind around, turn corners, and go uphill.
Père-Lachaise was established in 1804 by Napoleon, with a view to blending an English-style garden. Indeed, all sorts of tree specimens appear, crowded in and jammed together amongst the tombs — it was a conscious plan to make it so chaotic looking, undertaken by an architect named Alexandre-Theodore Brongniart. Although at first Parisians were reluctant to utilize the cemetery (because at the time it was not so central), eventually it became the most fashionable internment place of the dead in France.
My favorite tombs (and I used Google directions to find them) were some of the most visited: Oscar Wilde, Edith Piaf, and Frédéric Chopin. But of course I, a Medieval historian, had to pay homage to the remains of Heloise and Peter Abelard.
It was interesting to notice the difference between the elaborate memorialization of the special dead and the vast anonymity of the bones stacked upon each other in the Parisian catacombs, located not very far from Père-Lachaise.
