The Naples Strategy

written by David Bravo Bordas

 

Like the taxi driver or writer of tourist guides, the architect dreams of a city that is fixed and hence comprehensible and describable. Yet, almost without exception, the city, refractory, persists in fleeing the finished form. Even cemeteries, places built as havens for eternal rest, are subject to never-ending change. They expand when they can and, when they can’t, they grow in density, occupying interstitial spaces between tombs or piling up in rows of niches. Sooner or later, they end up having to replace old sepulchres with new ones, thus demonstrating that no grave is eternal, that last resting places, too, are provisional. If the necropolis keeps changing how would the city of the living not do so?