A journey of discovery to explore this ghost of Messina's history, a treasure-chest of neo-Classical and Art-Nouveau sculpture, a book published in Italian and English which will open up this unique place to a wider audience.
Opened in 1872, from the outset, the great Cemetery of Messina was conceived as a true ‘urban park’. It’s still one of Italy’s finest monumental cemeteries, symbol of a time and an epoch which have gone for good. Through a series of strictly black and white photographs, Luigi Spina tells the story of famous and unknown men and women who believed that they could mark their existence, and their lives, more effectively by commissioning artworks and architectural compositions of extraordinary beauty. In a kind of Dantesque circle, he sets off on a journey up hills and down dales through a landscape of columns and tree-trunks, chapels erected by noble families, marble busts and statues set amid dense, untended vegetation, testimonials to the passion and love of art of artists, artisans and the people who commissioned the works. You must know how to look and, more particularly, how to listen. Listen to those once-speaking voices which have entrusted themselves to a few lines, carved in the hard stone. An action, a gesture of times gone by, somehow rendering death – paradoxically -easier to bear.