I decide to travel to Modena, intending to relate these texts with the visit of a physical place for mourning: Aldo Rossi’s San Cataldo Cemetery. Whilst travelling by train through the foggy Padan Plain to Emilia-Romagna, with its many agricultural villages, I spot a few cemeteries from the window: compact and walled structures, with outlines of family graves emerging from their perimeters, revealing a certain amount of diversity within the latter.

The condition of Modena’s main cemetery may be comparable to Venice. There, death is outsourced. The departed are taken to the San Michele island with funerary boats, crossing in a truly Dantesque way the Canale delle Fondamente Nuove, a symbolic threshold between life and death. Modena's San Cataldo is located in the northwestern periphery of the city. I nevertheless decide to go there on foot, which is compensated by a series of inventive post-war housing discoveries along the way.

The cemetery's size is striking, which the urban plan emphasises rather than hides. The project of Aldo Rossi and Gianni Braghieri mirrors the historic part of the cemetery, abstracting its architectural elements and organising them around a central cubical 'house'. The concept behind this cemetery is straightforward, yet radical: if there is a city for the living, then this is the city for the dead (la città dei morti). Indeed the different typologies to be found are abstractions of the houses of the living, or rather abandoned versions of them: no roofs (or sky-coloured roofs) and (where possible) no windows and no doors, only their frames. Materials, colours, volumes… it's the same catalogue of elements I previously encountered on my path to San Cataldo.

In Rossi's part of the cemetery the departed are truly equal, a democratic project reduced to the pure memory of who has left us. Everything is numbered, or encoded with numbers, letters or cardinal directions – death standardised. This even includes family chapels that typically would reflect the wealth of their owners, as impressively displayed in Milan’s Cimitero Monumentale. It's often said that all are equal before death, but in reality, our strive for uniqueness, to be different and better than others, is clearly reflected on cemeteries.

Yet, or thus, the Modenese do not want to be buried there. This led to the extension of smaller and more central cemeteries, what in return moved into the uncertain the need to complete Rossi’s project. A central spine and a 25-meter-high truncated cone, meant as a church of all religions, has yet to be realised. As well, the perimeter buildings are awaiting extension when the number of available tombs reaches its limit. The unpopularity of San Cataldo can be blamed on its remote location, but above all, the impossibility of differentiation. There are options (single or double niches, family burials), but no formal exceptions. The municipal regulations of the mortuary police limits p.ex. 'the choice of colour and type of marble' or retain the decorations and flowers from 'protruding more than 20 centimetres from the tombstone.'[1]

Indeed, the impossibility for the dependants to celebrate the individualism of their departed is compensated by the use of (prevalently artificial) flowers. Everything else is kept pure, emphasised by the long shadows of the clear postmodern volumes. The surreal impression of San Cataldo, as if entering a Giorgio de Chirico painting, seems to evoke a dream scene in Fellini’s 8½ in which the main character encounters his deceased parents in a cemetery. The father of Guido (the main character played by Marcello Mastroianni) complains that he wished the ceiling of the mausoleum was higher: 'Do you see how low the ceiling is here? I would have liked it higher. It's ugly, my son, it's ugly. I would have liked it different. Couldn't you take care of it, Guido? You used to draw so well. I'd like…'

The pragmatic way that the extension of San Cataldo is planned, laid out, and used, is indeed defying what I was culturally educated to believe a cemetery is. Rossi’s project presents itself to me as an archive. It simultaneously feels intensely intimating and liberatingly uncomplicated. This is only enhanced by the fact that for several days I have analysed the digital dimension of death, which I more and more interpret like a struggle to accept our own mortality. A quote from an associate professor of American Art and Architecture at the University of Missouri, which I read whilst researching for one of the previous entries, comes to my mind:

San Cataldo also evokes another important aspect: not the danger, but the 'right to be forgotten'. In the digital realm, this is the right of individuals to ask organisations to delete their personal data. Beyond these regulations on privacy, aimed to guarantee our rights as living, this also has effects on our digital afterlife. We may wrongly assume that it is everyone’s endeavour to 'live forever' and for relatives who seek closure, this possibility could well be a haunting one. The trailer of the digital legacy provider SafeBeyond portrays a father that posthumously greets his daughter on her wedding day. This may, in theory, seem touching, but could as well be experienced like a destabilising intrusion.

Rossi’s cemetery is one extreme. The quirkiness of social media is another one. But with the accession of the latter, the physical places in which we are interred may be increasingly reduced to their principal need. The soberness of San Cataldo could be a prototype for the future, able to not only remind us of our physical vulnerability but also our replaceability. What lives on are anecdotes, images, stories and intellectual legacy. The digital means to pass them on will evolve, but then again, like our physical lives, these are limited in time.

Thanks to Carmen Hines, Bernadette Krejs and João Prates Ruivo, who read and informally discussed these posts with me as they were being written.