This week marked two festivals devoted to the Dead: Halloween and All Saints Day. In Italy November 1 is called il giorno di Tutti i Santi or Ognissanti and is an occasion to remember those who have died. There are a bunch of traditions associated with the day, each region has its own customs and delicacies to mark the occasion.
It is also a time for families to visit the graves or ossuaries of loved ones and to bring flowers to their final resting places. In the weeks leading up to Ognissanti it’s pretty common to see people carrying buckets, detergent and scrubbing brushes through cemeteries, ready to spruce things up.
I was thinking this week of the Monumental Cemetery of Turin, which was opened in November 1829. Today it is a walled space of 600,000 square metres that is both an active cemetery and an open-air museum nicknamed the “City of Silence.” John and I got familiar with it a couple of years ago when he broke his elbow and wanted somewhere traffic-less to go for our daily walks.
Primo Levi
Probably the most famous Torinese interred in the cemetery is in the Jewish graveyard, which is separate from the vast Christian/Catholic section. It lacks statuary, with pebbles instead of flowers; Hebrew instead of Italian; and Stars instead of Crosses. Here is the resting place of Primo Levi (1919-1989), celebrated for his rationalist descriptions of being imprisoned in and surviving Auschwitz in If This Is a Man (1947), The Truce (1963), The Periodic Table (1975). His headstone includes the prison camp number 174517, which had been tattooed on his skin on entering Auschwitz and with which he sometimes signed letters.
He has been coming to my mind lately as Israel destroys the concentration camp of Gaza, justifying a war crime with Biblical and dehumanizing rhetoric. What would Primo Levi say? When Menachim Begin invaded Southern Lebanon in 1982, he wrote a letter called “Why Israel Must Withdraw”, which gained 1,500 signatories. He called for Begin’s resignation and for the rest of his life he started to feel more and more alienated from the reality of Israel, so different from the ideal. A lot of people have mis-used Levi’s words for their own purposes, and he himself consistently, carefully stopped short of comparing any other atrocity to the Shoah. Even so, this observation seems both prescient and a comfortingly clear moral absolute now that 9,000 Gazans have died in three weeks:
“Auschwitz is outside of us, but it is all around us, in the air. The plague has died away, but the infection still lingers and it would be foolish to deny it. Rejection of human solidarity, obtuse and cynical indifference to the suffering of others, abdication of the intellect and of moral sense to the principle of authority, and above all, at the root of everything, a sweeping tide of cowardice, a colossal cowardice which masks itself as warring virtue, love of country and faith in an idea.”
Beyond the secluded peace and regularity of the Jewish cemetery, the main part is busy with statues, architecture and mosaics that compete for your attention to the point that it sometimes feels like an abandoned art studio.
Carlo Cherasco
One of the statues represents the controversial figure of Carlo Cherasco (1891- ). He was a soldier who fought in the Italian invasion of Libya (1911). He emigrated to Buenos Aires but returned to fight as an ardito (the arditi literally means ‘the daring ones’; they were shock troops) in World War I. Their job was to sneak up to the enemy’s trenches under supporting artillery fire, then jump in and stab everyone to death. Their motto was “O la vittoria, o tutti accoppati” “Either Victory or Everyone Dies.” Often they dispensed with guns because they were cumbersome and, besides, not as impressive.
After the war Cherasco became an enthusiastic blackshirt, helping to break the big strikes in 1920. His monument was vandalized in the 1970s but fully restored in 2002.
Doctor Carlo Gozzano
Doctor Carlo Gozzano, aside from being a dog lover, was a doctor who served in the Crimean War. A wealthy man who owned land and villas in the comune of Agliè (where the Savoia family had a palace), he was a close friend of the politician and artist Massimo d’Azeglio. His grandson Guido Gozzano (1883-1916), wrote a poem in his memory. Here is an excerpt:
Granddad, the silver of your gray hair
shines in the light of the trails:
you pass between fig, plum and pear trees
a basket of first fruits in your hands:
“The September rains are already propitious
white and black figs swell on the branch,
Claudia plums… to whoever works and hopes
Jesus grants all delights!”
Twenty years later, today, in the living room
I live again with the scent of mint
and of quince everything that was.
Monumento Moriondo
Just inside the cemetery’s main entrance off Corso Novara, there is a very striking statue that doesn’t seem to be particularly associated with anyone’s memory. This is the work of Cesare Reduzzi (1857-1911), whose work can be seen all around Turin, particularly in the monumental statues on Ponte Umberto I.
This disturbing work depicts a young woman who is unconsciously being stalked by the faceless figure of Death who seems to be wrapped in a huge bedsheet and on the verge of strangling His victim.
Giuseppe Durio
Durio, who lived in the late 19th century, was an entrepreneur who ran a tanning factory in the village of Madonna di Campagna in the 1870s and ’80s, thereby improving the economy of the region and assisting with its urbanization.
Considering his rather practical and prosaic profession, it is perhaps surprising that he has such a beautiful monument. “Grief Comforted by Memories” is a frieze created by the sculptor Leonardo Bistolfi, an exponent of Symbolism.
The work was completed in 1901, the year before the International Exposition of Modern Art in Turin, which was a major showcase of Liberty Style, the Italian manifestation of Art Nouveau.
Doctor Giacinto Pachiotti
Giacinto Pacchiotti (1820-1893) was a professor of surgical pathology and preparatory clinical surgery at the University of Turin. For a long time he was the head doctor of the Waldensian Hospital. He was Councilor for Hygiene of the Municipality of Turin and, in 1880, he was appointed Senator of the Kingdom of Italy.
This tribute to him was crafted by Luigi Contratti in 1896. It shows him giving comfort to a dying worker (he has sculpted working boots beautifully but you can’t see that here). Contratti studied under Bistolfi and worked with Cesare Reduzzi on the monumental sculptures on Ponte Umberto I Bridge, completed in 1911.
Bocca Family Monument
Bocca is an old Torinese family name. There is a Giorgio Bocca (1920-2011) who was a partisan during World War II and became famous for his outspoken essays and investigative journalism. In 1967, whilst in Israel during the Six Day War, he remarked on the indifference of locals to the consequences of the army’s occupation of the West Bank of ruling an Arab population.
This monument was crafted by Gaetano Cellini (1873-1937), a sculptor and painter. Probably his “most seen” work is the monument to Don Bosco that stands in front of Turin’s imposing Santuario di Maria Ausiliatrice. One of his greatest sculptures is Humanity Against Evil, which is now in Rome’s Gallery of Modern Art.
Of course, there are so many more interesting monuments there, it is impossible to mention them all. I will just leave a few more images in the hope that it may convince you to visit if you are ever in Turin!
