North Americans don't like graveyards. We don't go to them and we tend to think that anyone who does is a bit ghoulish. After all, just think of all those stories we grew up with about ghosts that walk at night and what a full moon can do to the mind of those who visit graveyards.   

But, graveyards are not merely burial sites. They are the resting places of history, the final destination of those who have shaped our own existences. And many of the world’s great cities have graveyards that are tourist destinations in themselves.

Vienna has great graveyards. But so too does Paris, Boston and Philadelphia, places where the great and famous are buried. And there's a place near Salzburg - the Wallfarhtkirche in Arnsdorf at the church where Silent Night, Holy Night was composed - where if you walk to the back, near the rear entrance you find a line of skulls behind a mesh wall. Each is inscribed with a family name and a date.

They were moved because in three centuries of burials the town had run out of room and the earliest now had to make room for the latest. In Salzburg itself is the Mozart family plot where Leopold – Wolfgang’s father – and Mozart’s wife, Constantia, are buried.

When you travel, graveyards really should be on your list of places to visit. They give you a more personal relationship with history and with the people who shaped their own and our worlds. In Boston, for example, you can make a tour of a variety of gravesites; coming across Paul Revere’s resting place, John Hancock and others of the American Revolutionary period.  

There are the famous war cemeteries that everyone knows about at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania and in Washington, D.C. or at Normandy where we constantly see political leaders placing wreathes at ceremonial moments. But there are others, less famous, that are worthy of attention.  

In Vienna, for example, is the Central Cemetery (Zentralfriedhof) where in sections 32C and 14C you find the Grove of Honor. It's the final resting places of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, the Strauss family, Gluck, Schoenberg, and Hugo Wolf, among others – all with a few steps of one another. Across town at the Cemetery of St. Mark, laid out in the 18th Century, is where they buried Mozart in an unmarked grave in the Masonic style of the time.

When I was young and living in Europe, my father asked that I visit Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, and bring back a photo of Chopin's grave. A bit weird, I thought at the time, and I made the trip with some reluctance wondering if my father had had a sip too much.  But when I walked through the gates, I found myself walking past the gravesites of people whose work or influence was affecting my own life at that moment. And the effect has stayed to this day.

Established by Napoleon in 1804, Pere Lachaise is possibly the world's most-visited cemetery, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors annually to the graves of those who have enhanced French life over the past 200 years.

Occupying 44 hectares (109 acres) on the eastern edge of Paris, here were Chopin, Bellini, David, Comte, Hugo, Oscar Wilde, the Bonapartes, Rossini, Sara Bernhardt, Delacroix, Balzac, Bizet, Proust, to name just a few. And when I finally came to Chopin's final resting spot, there was a fresh rose on the grave site. Flowers are left every day, and have been for years, placed there by visitors and residents alike.      

Years later, on a bicycle trip through the high plateau country of northern France my wife and I came across three cemeteries in the middle of nowhere - on a battleground of the First World War.  There were an Italian and French site on one side of the road, and a German site on the other.  The Italian and French sites - they being allies in 1914 - were well kept with flags fluttering in the breeze. The German was a bit on the ragged side and there was no flag to mark the site.  

But the head markers at all three were inscribed with personal messages by mothers and wives who had come after the war to visit their sons and husbands one last time. The war of 1914-18 became more than pages in books or photos from a collection. At each grave there had been tears and sorrow.  

At Vienna's Central Cemetery or at Paris' Pere Lachaise, where the greats of history lie buried, tourists come to stand in awe of the great talents that are buried below. At that First World War cemetery, there is also something to be learned in the simple, faded messages written by unknown people.