On Saturday 10 May, the presentation of the sound guide to explore the San Cataldo monumental cemetery and the Aldo Rossi cemetery with new eyes - and new ears.
Saturday 10 May at 3 p.m. sees the launch of 'La città dei vivi, la città dei morti. A sound guide to the cemetery of Modena", an innovative project that combines history, architecture, music and technology, through an itinerary in stages. The appointment is at the entrance to the San Cataldo cemetery from Piazza Setti, on the florists' side. Participants are asked to bring a sufficiently charged smartphone, audio headphones and a willingness to be guided through an immersive journey. By framing a QR code, you access an interactive digital map that allows you to follow an itinerary to get to know the cemetery and hear the stories of its inhabitants. In the abstract and geometric language of the architects Rossi and Braghieri, as well as among the marble angels and epigraphs of the monumental cemetery, a layered narrative takes shape, capable of creating a dialogue between past and present, silence and story.
The audio guide accompanies visitors along a fascinating route that embraces two cemeteries that are contiguous and of the same size, yet profoundly different in terms of age and conception. On one side, the monumental 18th-century cemetery, commissioned by Francesco III d'Este, one of the first examples in Italy of an extra-urban cemetery; on the other, the modern part designed in the 1970s by Aldo Rossi and Gianni Braghieri, an emblematic example of civil architecture, unfinished and with a strong symbolic charge.
The voices of the dead, interpreted by Modenese citizens and actors, tell the story of the city through the filter of individual and collective memory. Alongside the great personalities buried in the monumental cemetery - from Enzo Ferrari to the actress Virginia Reiter, from the Olympian Alberto Braglia to the mayor of the Liberation Alfeo Corassori - in the new cemetery the common people take the floor with their everyday stories, silent protagonists of the 'city of the dead' and moral and choral mirror of the 'city of the living'.
The audio tracks benefit from careful and evocative musical curation with original reinterpretations of classical pieces by Ravel, Beethoven, Mahler, Mendelssohn and the famous Danse macabre by Saint-Saëns.
The experience of visiting Aldo Rossi's new cemetery, which begins at the portico separating the historic cemetery from the new cemetery, is constructed with a completely different register: here begins something completely different, metaphysical and never the same, with the voices of the deceased guiding visitors through a deconstructed and Dadaist experience where music, at times obsessive and at others hypnotic, insinuates itself between the elementary geometric forms that make up the design, in a marriage of space and sound of great emotional tension.
The route on 10 May also includes a number of performance appointments at specific times and places, with actors and actresses giving live voices to selected texts (3.45 p.m. and 4 p.m. performance in front of Virginia Reiter's grave; 4 and 4.15 p.m. performance in front of Enzo Ferrari's grave; 4.15 p.m. and 4.30 p.m. performance in front of the entrance to the Jewish cemetery; 4.45 p.m. and 5 p.m. performance in the cube of the New Cemetery). The tour ends in the modern section of the cemetery where, after listening to the shared stories of its inhabitants through headphones, there will be a dance performance.
In addition to the audio guide, the project also includes a dedicated digital platform: cimiteromonumentale.comune.modena.it, where it is possible to consult archive documentation, photographs, thematic insights, audio content and other useful material to enrich one's knowledge of the place.
The platform is conceived as an ongoing project, interactive and open to new content, in which more material and contributions from citizens will be collected over time.
"The City of the Living, the City of the Dead. A Sound Guide to the Cemetery of Modena" is an initiative of the Culture Department of the Municipality of Modena, within the framework of the programme "Modena Unesco Creative City for Media Arts", in collaboration with Centro Musica and the Municipal Historical Archive, with the support of the Emilia-Romagna Region. The San Cataldo cemetery is one of the 31 monumental and historical cemeteries recognised by the Emilia-Romagna Region, within the framework of the regional law that promotes the recognition, valorisation and support of these sites.
The project, curated by Silvia Sitton (conception, co-ordination and texts), Silvia Berselli (historical research and texts), Francesco Fantoni (interface and graphics) and Corrado Nuccini (curatorship and musical production), in collaboration with the City Council's cemetery services, involved the participation of numerous professionals, including the architect Lucio Fontana, Lorenzo Marra for musical production and mixing, and the musical ensemble composed of Alessandro Trabace, Lorenzo Saini, Lorenzo Valdesalici, Maru Barucco and Antonio Maria Rapa. Acting voices include, among others, those of Salvo Cotrino, Fausto Ferri and the actors of the Compagnia delle Mo.Re.
