Which space, yesterday and today, can best represent the cultural, ethnic and religious diversity of the Mediterranean? Which ritual practices have gathered the religious civilisations of the past, and which can gather the plural identities of present and future societies, in a spasmodic search for new forms of spirituality? One possible answer to these questions is that architecture for death, as a manifestation of the sacred – understood in the secular sense, as an anthropological, indeed bio-logical fact – has always built an alliance between the living, driven by the common material need to eliminate the corpse and the common symbolic need to build an eternal home for the immortal soul. Passing through the gates of the afterlife in protohistory in Sardinia, the Etruscan Mausoleums, the underground “divine city” in Rome, the macabre spectacles in the Crypts of the Capuchins, the museum-cemeteries and cemeteries-parks, strictly extra-muros, created after the Napoleonic edict of 1804, and many other exemplary architectures for death, the “ash trail from Palermo to Trieste” is a small iconographic atlas, a collection of postcards that acts as an album of collective memories, mixing truth and fiction.
Quale spazio, ieri e oggi, può meglio rappresentare la molteplicità culturale, etnica e religiosa del Mediterraneo? Quali pratiche rituali hanno accomunato le civiltà religiose del passato e quali potranno accomunare le identità plurali delle società odierne e future, in spasmodica ricerca di nuove forme di spiritualità? Una possibile risposta a queste domande è che l’architettura per la morte, in quanto manifestazione del sacro – inteso in senso laico, come fatto antropologico, anzi bio-logico – da sempre costruisce un’alleanza tra i vivi, spinti dalla comune necessità materiale di eliminare il cadavere e dalla comune necessità simbolica di edificare una dimora eterna per l’anima immortale. Passando attraverso le porte dell’aldilà della protostoria in Sardegna, i Mausolei etruschi, la “città divina” sotterranea a Roma, gli spettacoli macabri nelle Cripte dei Cappuccini, i cimiteri-museo e i cimiteri-parco, rigorosamente extra-muros, nati dopo l’editto napoleonico del 1804, e molte altre architetture per la morte esemplari, la “via delle ceneri da Palermo a Trieste” è un piccolo atlante iconografico, una collezione di cartoline che funge da album di memorie collettive, in cui si mischiano verità e finzione.
Postcards from the underworld. The ash trail from Palermo to Trieste / PADOA SCHIOPPA, Caterina. - (2022), pp. 826-837.
Postcards from the underworld. The ash trail from Palermo to Trieste
Caterina Padoa Schioppa
2022
Abstract
Which space, yesterday and today, can best represent the cultural, ethnic and religious diversity of the Mediterranean? Which ritual practices have gathered the religious civilisations of the past, and which can gather the plural identities of present and future societies, in a spasmodic search for new forms of spirituality? One possible answer to these questions is that architecture for death, as a manifestation of the sacred – understood in the secular sense, as an anthropological, indeed bio-logical fact – has always built an alliance between the living, driven by the common material need to eliminate the corpse and the common symbolic need to build an eternal home for the immortal soul. Passing through the gates of the afterlife in protohistory in Sardinia, the Etruscan Mausoleums, the underground “divine city” in Rome, the macabre spectacles in the Crypts of the Capuchins, the museum-cemeteries and cemeteries-parks, strictly extra-muros, created after the Napoleonic edict of 1804, and many other exemplary architectures for death, the “ash trail from Palermo to Trieste” is a small iconographic atlas, a collection of postcards that acts as an album of collective memories, mixing truth and fiction.File | Dimensione | Formato | |
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