Cimitero Monumentale 1

…non averei creduto
che morte tanta n’avesse disfatta.
(Inferno, III)

A sunny day after one of thunderstorms and heavy rain, so everyone was out, and I decided on the Cimitero Monumental of Verona as a likely place for some tranquility away from the crowds.

The cemetery was designed by the architect Giuseppe Barbieri in 1828 to consolidate several burial places into one location and in accordance with Napoleonic law that burial places must be located outside the city wall. As the city of Verona grew, the original cemetery was not big enough and so was expanded in 1910. In the 1930s, the Ossuary Temple for the soldiers who died in the Great War and the Garden-Cemetery were added. The scholar Ippolito Pindemonte, the poet Berto Barbarani, the writer Emilio Salgari, and the artist Umberto Boccioni (among others) are buried there.

The first sight, as you come through the impressive entrance, is arresting; and beyond this first huge expanse of graves is another, equally large. There are larger cemeteries, where more people are buried, but perhaps it’s because the graves in the Cimitero Monumentale are closely packed that the impression is – for me anyway – so strongly of how many (in Dante’s words) death has undone. And perhaps because most Italian graves include a portrait of the occupant or occupants, it’s easier for me to think of the unknown-to-me buried as once having been real people.

Because I have more photographs to share than the ten per post that FindPenguins allows, this is the first of two parts on the cemetery.Read more