posted by prof_improbable #
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This small isle off the island of Corfu is likely the inspiration for the Arnold Böcklin series of paintings, "Isle of the Dead."
The real-life tiny isle contains a small chapel amid a cypress grove. The dream-like painting also depicts an oarsman rowing a figure wrapped in white to a structure on an island.
The painting was enormously popular in central Europe in the 1920s, so much so that Vladmir Nabokov said that a print was to be "found in every Berlin home." Adolf Hitler purchased one of the originals for his own; prints hung in the offices of Sigmund Freud, Vladimir Lenin, and Georges Clemenceau.
Another less likely candidate for the inspiration of the location is the island of Ponza in the Tyrrhenian Sea.