Cemetery of Monza, 1911-1912

Antonio Sant’Elia and Italo Paternoster

Competition for the Cemetery of Monza, 1911-1912

The competition for the new Cemetery of Monza was announced on 15th February 1912. Sant’Elia decided to take part with Italo Paternoster. The two friends worked together on the project they called “Chrysanthemum” until the October. The eleven plates showed, in addition to the perspective view conserved in the Pinacoteca Civica gallery of Como, the Colombarium, Funeral Chapel (plan and elevation), a domed building, the Crematory furnace (plan and section), the Memorial chapel and the general plans and the floor plans of the location, as documented in the Bestetti & Tuminelli catalogue. Thanks to the social connections of Italo Paternoster, for whom Monza was his home town, the drawing up of the project was able to be begun a year earlier, a fact testified to by the existence of some preliminary studies now in the Pellini (Milan) and the Banca Popolare di Lecco collections. The members of the adjudicating board that met to examine the twenty-one entries were Gaetano Moretti, Guido Civetti, Silvio Landriani and Giacomo Monti, who decided “after impartially studied the merits and shortcomings of each of the plans submitted […] were forced to agree that none of them was such as could without hesitation be chosen and realised in practice” (Moretti-Civetti-Monti 1912; Quaglia 1912). The proposal called “Chrysanthemum” did not convince the board because of a stated lack of technical expertise and its exotic influences. The jury was of the view that “the grandiosity of the composition in itself is not coherent with the dimensions shown in the drawings” and “the little, and sometimes complete absence of, correspondence between the elevations, the sections and the floor plans amounts to such a serious lack of professionalism that the Board cannot fail to deplore the whole proposal”. Such incoherence was adjudged “a great fault” that only damaged its positive elements of “a special and pleasing originality of style, even if perhaps inspired by oriental forms”, which latter characteristic frequently recurs in the architecture of that time, certainly not lacking in, for example, the work of Gaetano Moretti, who was himself an authoritative member of the adjudicating board.