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(Carlo Scarpa, Brion’s Cemetery, water pool. Photo by myself)

When Giuseppe Brion, founder of Brionvega firm, died in 1968, his wife Onorina asked the architect Carlo Scarpa for a tomb in the cemetery of Brion’s birthplace in Veneto: S.Vito di Altivole. Scarpa didn’t project a simple chapel but a very special place: a garden where the nature melts with the architectures.

There are a willow tree and three stairs at the main entrance. Here you can see two circular windows, meeting each other: they symbolize Giuseppe and Onorina’s love.

(Carlo Scarpa, Brion’s Cemetery, the circular windows. Photo by myself)

Walking through the entrance – called Propilei – you arrive at a large, sunny lawn in front of you. Here Carlo Scarpa built an arch and decorated it with coloured mosaic: the arcosolium, sort of bridge that connects the life and the death, the time and the eternity. The arcosolium protects two sarcophagi where Giuseppe and Onorina lie.

(Carlo Scarpa, Brion’s Cemetery, pavillon in the water pool. Photo by myself)

At the end of the lawn, on the right, you can see a large water pool, with a lot of waterlilies. From the water rises a pavillon, where you can go and think or pray, if you like. You can reach it walking on some stones put in the water. A spring of water squirts near the Brion’s sarcophagi and reaches the water pool by a narrow canal.

 (Carlo Scarpa, Brion’s Cemetery, the chapel. Photo by myself)

Walking on the lawn and turn on the left, you arrive to the Brion relatives’ chapel, then to the little church, rising from a small water pool. Finally you arrive to the cypress wood.

In a reserved part of the Brion’s tomb, in a second, very little cypress wood, lies Carlo Scarpa himself. He died in Japan in 1978 but he loved so much Brion’s garden that he asked to be buried here.

There is a lot of sun and water and plants and colours in the Brion’s cemetery, to defeat the Death and her sadness.