ABSTRACT
Cremation not only introduced a new way of dealing with human remains, but also a new way of commemoration. The scattering of ashes on special gardens of rest or remembrance was officially recognized in the UK during the 1920s, and the growing popularity in this practice led to decline in the need for columbaria as new forms of memorialization developed within the landscape of crematoria. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century one Italian group that provided occasion for discussing cremation and for establishing society for cremation was the Popular Circle of Giuseppe Mazzini, itself a brilliant focus of cultural interests and intellectual impulse in the Mazzinian and liberal tradition. In pre-Christian Europe cremating the dead on open wood pyres was as customary as burying them. Christianity's expansion restricted and finally suppressed cremation because of its heathen origin and because it was believed to contradict both the concept of resurrection of the body and of the cult of relics.
