L’Ossario semipogeo nel cimitero dell’Aquila. Tra architettura e paesaggio

In its dual role, part of the ‘cemeterial landscape’ hidden under the entrance terrace and monumental funeral building, the Common Ossuary of the Monumental Cemetery of L’Aquila, stands out for its modern image, taken after 1941, within a complex largely of nineteenth-century taste, which offers a small glimpse of the architectural and stylistic evolutions that took place, between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, also in in cemetery architecture. In particular the ossuaries, for the function of ‘collective burial’, often realized in memory of particular mournful events, decline the theme of monumentality in the different expressions it assumes between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, between Historicism and Rationalism. Abstract monumentality of volumes and materials, elimination of decorative elements and research of the architectural archetype, typical of military shrines promoted during the Fascist regime in memory of the victims of the Great War, also characterize the Aquila Ossuary, albeit in its small size and in a local reality. Alfredo Cortelli and Mario Gioia designed it with a rationalist style, contributing with other local professionals and leading figures of the national architectural scene, to insert the modern language in the Abruzzo capital, still in the twentieth century linked to historicist dictates. Unavailable for some years, thanks to recent works to remedy the damage caused by the infiltration of rainwater and, above all, by the 2009 earthquake, the Common Ossuary will soon be able to reacquire its dual function as an element of the ‘cemetery landscape’ and of memory.