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1. 

   'Aldo Rossi: San Cataldo Cemetery' - Publication cover

   

   'Aldo Rossi: San Cataldo Cemetery' - page sample

   

   'Aldo Rossi: San Cataldo Cemetery' - page sample

   

   'Aldo Rossi: San Cataldo Cemetery' - page sample

   

   'Aldo Rossi: San Cataldo Cemetery' - page sample

   

   'Aldo Rossi: San Cataldo Cemetery' - page sample

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     'Aldo Rossi: San Cataldo Cemetery' - Publication cover

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     'Aldo Rossi: San Cataldo Cemetery' - page sample

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     'Aldo Rossi: San Cataldo Cemetery' - page sample

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     'Aldo Rossi: San Cataldo Cemetery' - page sample

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     'Aldo Rossi: San Cataldo Cemetery' - page sample

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     'Aldo Rossi: San Cataldo Cemetery' - page sample

   'The Blue of the Madonna' by Diane Y. F. Ghirardo (excerpt)

   We are alone in Death.

   Aldo Rossi knew this. He built it into the cemetery he designed in Modena, San Cataldo. Each tomb, each wall unit, each space where the bodies are held, testifies to that. It deliberately involved neither the joy of death nor the sorrow of the living, but rather the nexus of the two. Laterally the tombs rise three stories, continuing endlessly, broken up by the entry of light and passage to the upper stories. Walk through the three wings of operation, and their similarity is striking. Along those floors, each tomb is distinct: the images of the dead, each outlined in its own style: the flower placement is different, as is the rest of the façade, with the addition of scenes of motorcycles, cars, soccer, everything that individual families remembered of their dead. They remember, they celebrate, they mourn, in their own unique way, but they are set in a framework uniform in its distribution.

   ...

   To bind these spaces to architecture, then, he wanted to design something that spoke to all the religious forms. While his deepest memories were personal, it could nonetheless be seen as a quintessential cemetery, just like the one to its left, San Cataldo. To then link the spaces that made them hierarchical constituted a profound wrong, a denial of the very essence of Death itself.

   He resisted the claim for erecting family tombs for those gifted in life with more power and fortune than others. Reluctantly, however, he finally did design little houses along the main artery adjoining the Jewish cemetery, and the smaller but distinct tombs that lined the opposite end. Reluctant because he believed that in death, we are all alike, and he could not imagine that somehow, in death, we preserved the order, the money, the wealth, the power, that they had enjoyed in life. He knew this, for he believed, as do many others, that with death, we are transformed into something else. The stuff of those who argue for a continuous celebration for their dead, is simply untrue.

   They are bones, all bones.