So the ending of The Dark Knight Rises has Batman sacrificing himself to save the city of Gotham, flying off in his flying Bat with Bane's HUGE nuclear bomb to ensure it explodes far enough out to sea that it won't destroy the city. (though hardly far enough out of City that it wouldn't cause the Gothamites to probably go blind from watching the explosion and have a lot of problems with radiation over the next few years!). Now as you will have seen, Batman was flying across the water with the bomb and the last look we get at his face is when he has five seconds left on the counter before it explodes. HE HAS NO CHANCE OF SURVIVING. If he ejects, he's gone in the blast. Bruce Wayne has made the ultimate sacrifice and he's blown to smithereens. So next we see his gravestone at Wayne Manor next to his parents and Michael Caine's Alfred is upset beyond belief. We then see a montage of what is clearly a "passing of the torch" of the mantle of Batman from Bruce Wayne to Joseph Gordon-Levitt's John Blake (or, in the biggest groan in the whole film, ROBIN!), likely enforced by Warner Bros who freaked out when Nolan said that he was going to kill off Bruce Wayne. The sequence goes like this... Alfred is given full ownership of Wayne Manor which he reverts into an orphanage, Gordon finds the Bat signal fixed, Blake finds coordinates to the Batcave entrance (where we presume he will take on the mantle of Batman for the next director) and we see Alfred sitting down at a cafe in Florence, giving the nod to Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle, signifying that Wayne survived the blast. The idea being that Batman has "sent a message" to all the important people in his life that he is ok... he survived and Batman lives on. OR DOES IT?