A Legacy Project

Tizi says, “Shall we go see Mario?”

We’re in the Serravalle cemetery. It’s a sunny weekday morning. She’s made her rounds–to her paternal grandparents, to the crypt with the older Canduccis she never knew, to her aunt’s family chapel, and to her aunt and uncle.

In a six-week stay in San Marino, we’ll come to the cemetery three or four times.  I know where everyone is. Usually I go with her on her rounds, but this morning it’s such a fine day, I take a bench and sit in the sun on the cemetery’s main floor. The dead are below ground in this section, buried, and only this section. Everywhere else, in the European fashion, they’re above ground, stacked one on top of another in tombs with marble facings (hatches behind which a casket rests). And on these hatches, along with name and date, there is a photograph. 

In the photo on Mario’s tomb, he is smiling. He was a pal in our building, married to the sister of Tizi’s closest childhood friend. I knocked on his door one day when the power in our apartment went out. He showed me what switch to flip downstairs. He took us to the outer edge of San Marino to buy ceramic tile for a bathroom remodel we planned. He was sitting outside on the bench in front of our building whenever we arrived, bleary from our long trip. He was full of news and fresh gossip. You didn’t have to drag it out of him. He loved sharing.

All those photos–the cemetery is like a photo album, a Serravalle magazine. You turn the pages and look at the familiar dead.

So yes, we always go see Mario now.

Throughout Italy, on billboards in cities and towns, are “manifesti,” announcements of memorial masses. On these broadsheet posters you see the names of the dead, the year of their deaths, and the dates of the mass. And you see, in vivid living color, photographs of the departed. Many of the photos, to me at least, are shocking. Look at that beautiful woman, I think. What a handsome man. She must have been a wonderful nonna.

In the cemetery I look at dates on the stones and do death math. Fabrizio, who came to live with us for six months, just died. He had just turned fifty. In six years I’ll be as old as Mario was when he died.  

The cemetery visits, the manifesti, it’s memento mori. You face the facts. You enjoy the warm sun a little more.