These places where our dead are need to engage us. They can be completely enticing, like the Via Appia here – you’re naturally drawn to stroll down this ancient road that was lined with mausoleums and tombs. It beckons.
These pathways lead you forward and through. And hopefully through beautiful gardened landscapes of plantings, and through memories and thoughts not only of any loved one buried, interred, or scattered here, but thoughts of the rest of humanity here. And mortality.
Cemeteries have to be places for people – or else people aren’t going to be engaged and aren’t going to visit them or experience them.
To be inviting to the living, cemeteries need to be vibrant, peaceful, and most of all, on a living and human scale.