Cagliari, Sardinia.
From the ship I can spot today’s objective, the Cimitero Monumentale Bonaria. You can just see mausoleums ‘mid the distant greenery.
Cagliari’s so proud of its burial ground, opened in 1829, that it even has a series of handsome (and free) postcards.
At the cemetery office, a very pleasant and helpful lady hands me postcards and a map and I’m off. I have the place to myself.
Up close, some of the mausoleums are stunning, for instance, this with its sphinxes, more pagan than Catholic. Built in the late 19th Century when there was a fascination with ancient Egypt.
Two soldiers, the second who died while fighting the Austro-Hungarians in 1917.
An early 20th Century, but decidedly modern, angel by the Sardinian sculptor Francesco Ciusa. He first exhibited - and won a prize - at the Venice Biennale in 1907. That a sculptor of such significance was hired makes plain the family’s wealth.
A bronze mother and children, but with death hauntingly just behind. haunting
However, I have come to track down ‘the Michelangelo of the dead’. From the 1880s to the 1920s, Giuseppe Sartorio was the one to contact if you wanted to make a serious impression in an Italian cemetery.
Here’s his Cagliari workshop. Sartorio may be the natty chap with beard, kerchief and left arm on hip.
A trompe-l’œil coffin. The actual coffin is behind the wall.
Mother and the child left to mourn.
From 1887, a grieving widow below the (now discoloured) bust representing her husband. Click on the pictures and the extraordinary detail, and remember that this would have been an individual, one-off, commission.
And a monument I can’t resist as monochrome …
… with the sculptor’s signature discreetly placed in one of the folds.
As for Sartorio, I don’t know if he has his own memorial. In 1922, sailing from Sardinia to Civitavecchia, he vanished. Accident? Suicide? Murder? There was never an answer.
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Sicily and Cagliari, Sardinia 2014:
