ocaso

pegadito al mar

no vale nada, salvo el estar junto al mar

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CARLO SCARPA (1906, Venecia - 1978, Sendai, Japón)

One of Carlo Scarpa's most iconic and seminal built works (and a project so close to his heart that a space in it was saved for his own use) the Brion family cemetery is host to this month's stunning Wallpaper* fashion story 'Death in Veneto'.

Brion-Vega Cemetery, Carlo Scarpa
Click here to see more of Scarpa's cemetery and behind the scenes of the fashion shoot.

Scarpa (1906-1978) designed the Brion-Vega in San Vito d'Altivole, near Italy's Treviso, as an extension to the family's existing cemetery. The architect developed the geometrical concrete composition over a 10-year period, with works finally reaching completion in 1978.

The L-shaped plot includes a complex of five buildings; a small chapel, the entrance hall, a small steel-and-wood pavilion on an island in the site's water pond, the main tomb, and an open-air structure covering the graves.

Aiming to create a poetic resting place as much as a sculptural memorial in a green, calming garden, Scarpa used well-thought-out design features; for example, the cemetery walls are not higher than the surrounding field's plants, discreetly merging the structure into the landscape. Within the site, there is also a small island with no apparent access for visitors, which perhaps works as a metaphor for the afterlife.

The architect himself rests, vertically, in the cemetery walls, after passing away in 1978 during a trip to Japan - the same year that his last masterpiece was finished.

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eye discovered this service :-)

The garden at Bomarzo was built in the sixteenth century by an Italian nobleman as a memorial to his wife Guilia. Populated by Fish-tailed Harpies, Fortified Elephants, a Grotto of Venus and a Mask of Madness, turtles, lions, dragons and bears, it was called a ‘sacred grove’ - Sacro Bosco, by its creator, Vicino Orsini (c.1513-84).


Like many other Italian Renaissance gardens, Vicino’s Sacro Bosco was anything but ornamental. Constructed rather with images and ideas, the garden and its statues can be read by the enlightened visitor like a book, providing a philosophical journey through themes such as love, death, memory and truth. Vicino’s garden-book is, however, obscure and ambiguous, and requires a knowledge of poets such as Dante, Petrarch and Ariosto to unravel; every reading produces a different set of ideas that reflect the complex personality of Vicino himself.

The visitor is nevertheless spared carrying around a library of Italian medieval and renaissance poetry by the many inscribed quotations that Vicino placed around his garden. On the pedestal of one of a pair of sphinges found in the garden is a typically gnomic sentence:

CHI CON CIGLIA INARCATE / ET LABBRA STRETTE / NON VA PER QUESTO LOCO / MANCO AMMIRA / LE FAMOSE DEL MONDO / MOLI SETTE

(He who does not visit this place with raised eyebrows and tight lips will fail to admire the seven wonders of the world.)

Vicino is boasting of his garden, but also paraphrasing Ariosto’s poem Orlando Furioso, suggesting that the theme of the poem, unrequited love and loss, is one of the keys to his philosophical garden. Further clues to the meanings of the sacro bosco may be revealed by looking at a few of its many statues and monuments.

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eye discovered this service :-)