John Witty

If you have spent any time talking to me, you will have noticed that I spend a lot of time talking about my friend Nicole. In Nicole's blog from last spring, she mentioned the San Miniato cemetery. Nicole and I have spent much time exploring cemeteries in a variety of places in the years that we have known each other. Thus it fits that I have chosen a cemetery for my space.

The body and architecture. Cemeteries are architectural spaces created to house bodies. Especially in Italy, where traditional cemeteries have the odd form of "apartment houses" - blocks of small concrete boxes, designed to conserve space in this densely populated country....

But the Cemitero degli Inglesi is different. To start, it is a traffic island of the dead. Venice has a real island of the dead, but here in Florence, a traffic island of the dead is enough to capture my imagination. The cemetery was founded by a community of Swiss immigrants in the 1800s. It went on to become a burial place for non catholic foreigners from across northern Europe. My host mom explained that often times all foreigners with light skin were lumped together under the label "inglesi."

Now the cemetery has the form of a great mound surrounded by busy boulevards. Covering the mound is a jumble of grey tombs with elaborate, sentimental 19th century sculptures. Perhaps everyone's favorite is the permanently kneeling widow who mourns over her husbands grave. She holds a marble wreath of flowers, and a small stairway has even been constructed to complete the vignette. The cemetery doesn't have that typical, odd "apartment house" design, but it is still very much a constructed architectural space, intended to house bodies.

My body interacts with this space as a result of my old attraction to cemeteries - something that I can't shake and always follow. I am among the many "inglese" who have interacted with Florence over the years, so it seems fitting that I should follow my old fascinations to a place that many from a group to which I belong have chosen as their final space of interaction with.

I wish that I had met the English nun with whom Allegra enjoyed talking, though the upswing is that I then had no one to tell me not to take photos, something that was irresistible in such an atmospheric setting.