Milan’s Cimitero Monumentale: Where Memory Meets Beauty
Two years ago, I was lucky enough to be able to visit Milan’s famous Monumental Cemetery, which is acclaimed for its architecture, size, and scope, alongside the famous personalities associated with it. Designed primarily by Italian architect Carlo Manciachini, the Cemetery operates both as a memorial site and as an “open-air museum” (according to the Cemetery’s brochure), displaying generations of history through its architecture and its monuments.
Apart from its sheer size, the Cemetery’s palatial layout cements it as one of Milan’s most beautiful sites, and its detailed sculptures pay tribute both to their creators and to the individuals they commemorate. When you enter the site, you are immediately aware that this is not your usual run-of-the-mill cemetery, an impression that is furthered by the domed ceilings, the marbled hallways lined with majestic vaults, and its extensive grounds, replete with sculptures that rival those of the world’s most famous galleries. Perhaps the most famous tomb within the building itself is that of Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni (famous for his novel ‘I Promessi Sposi’, or ‘The Betrothed’), housed in the Cemetery’s Famedio (the ‘Temple of Fame’, dedicated to the memory of the illustrious, famous citizens connected to Milan). Interestingly, the Monumental Cemetery also contains one of Europe’s first crematoriums, known as ‘Il Tempio Crematorio’, or ‘The Crematorium Temple’.
The Cemetery’s splendour is only magnified outside the building, both in its grounds and through the monuments built into the walls that encircle it. Among the numerous mausoleums and other eye-catching monuments to the dead, these are two of the many that stood out:
- A larger-than-life sculpture of the Last Supper, highlighting the final resting place of the Famiglia Davide Campari (the Davide Campari family) of the Campari brand, sculpted by Giannino Castiglioni.
2. A detailed sculpture that depicts Christ on the cross surrounded by mourners, atop the mausoleum of the Famiglia Ferdinando Bocconi, designed by Guiseppe Boni and sculpted by Orazio Grossoni.
Though I could write paragraphs about this beautiful Cemetery and the monuments it contains, I would never be able to put down in words the feelings it inspires, or the recognition it merits (if you would like to see more pictures of the Cemetery, watch this YouTube video). Furthermore, that is not the intention of this piece, which I began as a thought-piece on the musings this site prompted. There is something eerily peaceful, even comforting, about graveyards, an atmosphere that connects the past to the present and to the future, and that envelopes us in the hush of ages past. Thinking of Milan’s cemetery in relation to cemeteries here in Sri Lanka and in relation to other monuments of remembrance such as Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, it seems that the importance of these sites is not only whom we memorialise, but also how we memorialise. How do we choose to memorialise an individual, and why? Sometimes, it is with grandeur, an unusual monument that testifies to an important family, seemingly suggesting wealth and fame. Sometimes, it is with a desire for authenticity, a house preserved in memory of a girl who represents both an entire community and a tragic period in history. More often, it is in the form of a simple headstone or plaque that marks the grave of a loved one. To me, all these instances are equally valid evidence of remembrance as a pervasive part of all our cultures, an act and a process that says as much about us as about the person we are memorialising. That feeling of peace and nostalgia that lingers around you in a graveyard, and that prevented me seeing the Monumental Cemetery as just another tourist attraction, is partly the awareness of what we have come to see as the sanctity and inevitability of remembrance, a reverence for the dead that is common to every graveyard you visit, whatever its size or scope. It is also a kind of ephemeral awareness of the intertwined stories, lives, and memories that haunt all graveyards, that reminds us of the ones we have lost and sometimes of our own mortality. In fact, perhaps this is precisely why we feel that strange, otherworldly peace in cemeteries; adapting a quote from Denise Inge, perhaps it is because they “insist on nothing, demand or require nothing of (us) except the admission…that one day (we) shall join them in bare beauty, stripped even of flesh and sinews, disjointed, naked and alone”.
