Traveling Burnside Project - Cimitero Monumentale

... cemeteries seem to magically attract me again ... I spend a fair amount of time on one or the other at the moment.

Mostly, I am touched by the quiet and serene mood right from the beginning. It kind of suits my current mindframe quite well - not that death is sitting in the living room again ( luckily! ) - but it sometimes seems I can feel the turbulences caused by his cloak when he turns away  ...

Apart from that, I always feel reminded of Marcel Reich Ranicki's statement that there are but two themes in literature: love and death. Standing amid those old and silent graves I feel that this ist true for live as such: the most important topics worth thinking and musing about are those two. And it feels to me as if they merge in all cemeteries as such - but exceptionally in the Cimiterio Monumentale in Milan where you can find extraordinary monuments by really great sculptors of the 1900s.

Those monuments are really very very impressive.
And most of them show love in some form and expression. Very many show young females with not really much on them in way of clothing, some are even quite erotic (to be honest, after a while I asked myself if I could find some equally beautiful male examples - and found them 😉) .

I found myself touched over and over again not just by the artistry which was very impressive all in itself but I was very moved by those emotions that were cast in bronze or carved out of stone, emotions which have not changed in all the years and centuries -  in pain and in love I found myself there over and over again.

The Burnside 35 lent itself quite beautifully to the task of capturing the serenity and the feeling if this place, I love how the swirl gives the pictures a kind of etheral quality and timelessnes. As well as the Burniside performed at landscape photography I even liked it better at those portraits and transporting the mood of this place.