Architecture of death

Ever since I was a child, death and its trappings have fascinated me, perhaps because death was--is--so huge and so terrifying and yet so rarely talked about with any candor. Graveyards I found particularly intriguing, since they were not only full of dead people but also crammed with stories that were compelling yet incomplete. How did that long-ago mother feel about burying three young children, and how did they die? What happened to the man who passed away at the age of only 23? What led a family to erect a granite monument to their father but leave him all alone when their own time came?

I therefore would have been fascinated by the cemetery in Fidenza even if it had been just another graveyard. But it is also weirdly, wonderfully different from the American graveyards I'm used to.

Located just on the other side of the railroad tracks, a few blocks from our place, it is very large and has a variety of resting places. Unlike an American graveyard, Fidenza's isn't all graves but is made up of lots and lots of structures. There's a chapel, but most of the real estate is taken up with open-air breezeway sorts of things.

The majority of cimitero residents are tucked into niches in the walls of these buildings, a practice that echoes Fidentinos' evident fondness for living in apartment buildings rather than single-family houses.

There are miles of these niches, called loculi, and most seem well tended. (Although a few have notices taped to them asking any relatives to please contact the cemetery office immediately. I suspect a bill is overdue.)

When I visited the cimitero on a recent Sunday dozens of people were coming in and out, making visits to deceased relatives. The loculi are engraved with religious emblems, inspirational sayings, photographs, and expressions of love, as well as names and dates. Most are adorned with flowers as well, often artificial but frequently fresh. The cemetery provides ladders, watering cans, and brooms to help people keep their kin tidy.

There's a tiny Jewish section tucked away in the back. I had a hard time finding it again. 

All the spots along the sides are marked with just a number. Whether these are unclaimed plots or anonymous dead I don't know. I'll have to figure out who does.

Although almost all the cimitero's graves are decorated, few are very elaborate. This isn't anything like the famously over-the-top Staglieno cemetery in Genoa (which I am determined to go see in the not too distant future). Most of what's in Fidenza's cemetery is the opposite of spectacular, just sadly everyday expressions of grief and love.

This ode to motherhood caught my eye. "The poetry of life is composed of a single word: Mama."

Fidenza has been around for centuries, but most of the folks in its cemetery departed this mortal coil within the last thirty or so years. My friend Franca explained that Italians have a system for not letting the dead take up too much space.

Forty years after someone is interred, she told me, they open up the loculo and pull out the coffin. If it still feels heavy they put it back and give it some more time. If it's light, they open it up and move the bones--which is all that's left--into a much smaller box that can share another relative's loculo or... Well, Franca wasn't sure what happens if there aren't any relatives left to deal with the bones, but the authorities put them somewhere. Presumably there's a record of where they've been laid to more permanent rest.

I'd assumed this box I glimpsed when I was wandering the grounds one afternoon was empty, but now I wonder if it was someone in the process of relocating.

I have to say that I found Franca's explanation more than a little shocking. But when people have been living in the same place for thousands of years a system like this is probably necessary.

Most likely the 40-and-out rule doesn't apply to those loved ones who are housed in separate mausoleums, of which the Fidenza cemetery has dozens and dozens lining its streets.

The array of architectural styles is amazing. Some mausoleums look like offices, some like spacecraft, some like bank vaults or jewel boxes.

Do people pick the designs out of a catalog or are there architects that specialize in customized tombs? I hope I can find out.

 

Only a very few of them resemble what I would expect a mausoleum to look like.

I was particularly struck by how tall all of them are. A few weeks ago we went house-hunting with an Italian friend and saw a place whose ground floor ceilings were eight feet high, something you see often enough in U.S. apartment buildings. The realtor told our friend that legally the downstairs space could only be used as a garage, because the ceilings were too low for human habitation. Or at least for Italian habitation. Well, apparently even in death Italians can't live without at least 10-foot ceilings.

The cemetery also offers more conventional graves, and there are hundreds of those, too.

The wooden crosses seem to be new arrivals.

The headstones come later. But they're propped up with wooden boards...is that a temporary measure during the rainy season or some kind of budget alternative to the more firmly fixed headstones further back?

I'll end with a picture of a little monument near the front gate. The motto means, "To all the dead." I wish I knew the history of this, too.

There are so many questions about the cimitero that I'm dying, er, very eager to get answers to. Good thing I'll be back in a few months.