ABSTRACT
Related to interment, the use of the word “landscape” in southern Europe is still imprecise, despite the ambiguous and disconcerting fascination that “landscape” presently enjoys there. Nor do cemeteries exist in any single form. “Graveyard islands” have become places of isolation and loss of boundary, overwhelmed by urban sprawl and profound changes in the countryside. In other places the original notion of the camposanto (churchyard or holy ground) still sporadically survives, holding out against the pressures of major social change. In addition, contemporary architecture offers us models and symbolic messages often far removed from the meaning of death held today by modern society. Clearly, there is today neither agreement nor any single approach to the design of landscapes for the dead. Even so, the collective memory of burial roots it in a landscape as a funerary ground. This perception, which is intrinsic to the southern European tradition, largely disappeared in the second half of the twentieth century, but has resurfaced in certain enlightened—though dissimilar—examples and locations. These examples provide some hope for a renewed cemetery culture.
