Cities are aggregations accommodating people's lives, and cemeteries, as final abodes for people, constitute fundamental components of the overall urban morphology. Cemeteries function not only as burial sites but also as carriers for the spirit and memory of the living; this special cultural attribute enables them to enduringly influence the process of urban morphological evolution. Taking Milan, Italy's long-standing economic and cultural center, as a representative case, its urban cemetery morphology, throughout more than two millennia of history, has continually interacted with the urban economy and social activities of different periods, becoming an 'index fossil' that reflects and reveals the laws of urban spatial evolution.