Alessandro Mendini’s ODE TO MONUMENTALE CEMETERY in Milan
The Monumentale cemetery in Milan is the most romantic place I’ve ever visited. I used to go there as a child, in sun or rain, heat or snow, led by the hand to place flowers on my grandparents’ small but beautiful grave, which had been designed by a gentleman who told me to be famous, the architect Piero Portaluppi (who also built our house).
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View of the different burial crypts at Monumentale cemetery in Milan, Italy. Photographed for PIN–UP by Carlo Lavatori.
I walked down the cemetery avenue with awe, afraid of meeting skeletons, and one after another encountered absurd and fascinating monuments to ghosts, a hodgepodge of micro-architectures, a jumble of enormous, languid, grieving marble figures, of angels, of tears in gilded bronze, of crosses — an environment beyond the human that was the summing up, the lapidary catalog, the funereal triumph of the industrialists and bourgeoisie of Milan, all lined up in a patchwork of little palaces.
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Building detail at the Monumentale cemetery in Milan, Italy. Photographed for PIN–UP by Carlo Lavatori.
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Building detail at the Monumentale cemetery in Milan, Italy. Photographed for PIN–UP by Carlo Lavatori.
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Building detail at the Monumentale cemetery in Milan, Italy. Photographed for PIN–UP by Carlo Lavatori.
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Alleyway between burial crypts at the Monumentale cemetery in Milan, Italy. Photographed for PIN–UP by Carlo Lavatori.
This was a triumphant performance outside of logic and context, the board for a giant chess game, a huge city in miniature, a backstage full of love. For to be true to the game, Milanese high society had to buy both a box at La Scala and a tomb at the Monumentale, designed by a famous architect and covered with rhetorical inscriptions.
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Alessandro Mendini's design for a family burial crypt at Monumental cemetery in Milan, Italy. Photographed by Carlo Lavatori for PIN–UP.
And that’s how, in the 1960s, I also came to build, on the edge of a gravel path, a severe expressionist chapel with macabre inhabitants.
Text by Alessandro Mendini (1931–2019).
Photography by Carlo Lavatori.
Taken from PIN–UP 16, Spring Summer 2014.