Walk the City of the Dead: Lecce's monumental cemetery

ETERNITY'S ONE-WAY STREET:
Lecce's massive cemetery gate

In his Fable of Love (Fiaba d'amore), Italian contemporary novelist Antonio Moresco sends two lovers to the city of the dead, there to find one another once again.

" 'Where am I?' said the marvellous girl to herself, looking around in that large city, dark and deserted, where she had just arrived."

The necropolis Moresco creates is a muffled version of the Milanesque city where the couple first meet and die. Still, his city of the dead has all the infrastructure of the big metropolis. It's just notably quieter; a more reflective setting for his reader to roam about, following the lovers' search.

Antonio Moresco by Luigi Tiriticco

It comes to me that Moresco has spent hours wandering boneyards, absorbing their atmospheres, inventing his alt-city. He sketches his place of the dead - forgive the pun - from life. Replete with railway stations, eateries and traffic lights, the necro-metro-polis that emerges in Fable of Love seems a very liveable place.

Lecce's city of the dead is a similarly muffled and de-energised version of the town.

I visit on the kind of blustery, windy day which keeps the old people indoors; so there are few bereaved about, and I find its streets deserted.

A street in Lecce's city of the dead

Moresco's book articulates something to be found also in Lecce's monumental cemetery. Here, too, the town remakes itself in its own subdued image. Mirrored but darkly. This Lecce for the dead makes itself strangely liveable; perhaps moreso than its quicker neighbour.

Here, the shade is deep and cool; water fountains abound (for the flowers, no doubt); what traffic there is never honks a horn.

It's a quiet neighbourhood

And just as Moresco's city has all the infrastructure needed for commuting and consuming, so Lecce's cemetery has everything its community needs. Nobody is roughing it here; least of all the cats, who get repurposed cupboards and boxes to curl up in.

Even the feral cats look clean

There's an unobtrusive orderliness which almost parodies how the city outside might be viewed by its own residents. This is no chaotic burial field, for under your feet run not bones, but pipes and cables.

The dead here still pay for metered electricity to keep their lamps lit.

There are bins for organic waste, full of decaying flowers. There are bins for plastic waste, full of plastic flowers. The rest is spent candle holders and empty tins of cat food.

And, as in the living Lecce, the wealthy are conspicuously so. At the end of Fable of Love, the dead couple finally meet again, and walk out of town together to his large suburban villa. But urban planning is tighter in Lecce, fitting tombs into angles. Here, the walk is shorter.

Small, medium or large?

"He digs and sings"

The groundspeople are friendly, despite being grotesquely underpaid. I know one personally; he works early until 1pm, and takes home ten euros per day. Wandering along, I bump into him. He's methodically raking gravel.

We stop for a chat. Bicycles. The weather.

Despite the hysterical iconography of winged hourglasses carved into crumbly pietra leccese, there's a notable lack of rush in the air.

It's an old cliché which holds true today; the man who walks with a smile among the tombs. Yet tourism is a dedicated search for clichés, living or dead. And here you might find one, raking up the leaves. You can dip a toe into his world, amongst the sorrowing Christs and the cats and the angels.

A famous grave

This is no Père Lachaise or Highgate Cemetery. With a general lack of famous names, there are few tourists wandering around.

In fact, the recurring local surnames (and occasional anonymity) have charm of their own.

Unnamed faces gaze out from their pillar

But the one really famous grave is that of Tito Schipa, whose diabetes killled him in 1965. He sang one of the 20th century's most celebrated tenor voices.

The subject of an exhibition currently running in Lecce, he's also the namesake of the local Conservatorio.

Practicalities

• Opening times are complex, depending on time of year and holiday/workday.
• If the monumental gateway is closed, the ordinary gate to its left may be open
• Vending machine and toilets are in the hexagonal building, left of the war memorial
• When you hear the wailing air raid siren, it's time to leave (unless you want to get locked in)

Endlessly amusing