The Memoriale Brion is Carlo Scarpa’s last completed work, a family burial garden built for the Brion family beside the village cemetery of Altivole. Nine years in the making, it is less a building than a walk through water, concrete and stone, each surface worked at full scale before it was ever fixed.
At a glance
The Memoriale Brion stands beside the working village cemetery of Altivole, in the province of Treviso, separated from it by a wall. It was commissioned in 1969 by the Brion family, owners of the electronics firm Brionvega, whose products such as the TS522 radio and the Doney television are known as landmarks of Italian industrial design. Carlo Scarpa spent nine years designing and building the site, working at full scale on every joint and material transition.
The result is an L-shaped garden of about 2,200 square metres containing pavilions, canals and passages, conceived as a sequence of compressed and released spaces rather than as a single structure.
Key facts
- Architect: Carlo Scarpa (1906–1978), who trained at IUAV Venice without completing his degree and practised without a licence for most of his career.
- Design method: Scarpa produced hundreds of drawings for single details, often at 1:1 or 1:2 scale, and continued to revise the design during construction.
- Water channels: the canals running through the site were not in the original plan; they were added after work had begun, requiring parts of the garden wall to be rebuilt.
- Archives: the Scarpa archive is held by the MAXXI museum in Rome; the most complete set of his working drawings is at the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice.
- Ownership: the site has been managed by FAI, the Fondo Ambiente Italiano, since 2023.
History
Carlo Scarpa was raised in Vicenza and trained as an architect in Venice, though he never completed his degree. His early career was in furniture and exhibition design and in work with the Venini glassworks on Murano, an experience that shaped his later handling of light and surface in stone and concrete, as seen at the Castelvecchio Museum in Verona (1958–1964) and the Fondazione Querini Stampalia in Venice (1963).
Giuseppe Brion died in 1969, and his widow Onorina Brion commissioned Scarpa to design the family burial site at Altivole. Construction ran from 1970 to 1978, with Scarpa continuing to revise the design on site throughout. He died in 1978 during a visit to Japan, before the work was finished; his son Tobia Scarpa completed the remaining elements. Carlo Scarpa is himself buried within the Memoriale, in a separate grave near the Arcosolio pavilion. Since 2023 the property has been in the care of FAI, the Fondo Ambiente Italiano.
What you see
Visitors enter from the village cemetery through a connecting passage. The first view is of the long wall of the L-shaped garden, broken by inclined concrete beams that frame the sky, a motif that recurs throughout the site in different forms.
At the centre stands the Arcosolio, a pavilion formed of two intersecting concrete arches sheltering the sarcophagi of Giuseppe and Onorina Brion. The arches meet at an angle rather than running parallel, echoing the two interlocking rings of the Brion family emblem, a motif repeated several times elsewhere in the garden in different materials and scales. The sarcophagi themselves are set at an angle so that husband and wife appear to lean towards one another. The upper surfaces of the arches were designed to encourage moss to grow, while the underside remains smooth concrete.
The Pavilion of the Pool, or Padiglione della Peschiera, is reached through a sunken passage and a door that pivots like the hull of a boat. Inside, a low window shows only the surface of the surrounding water, so that the visitor sits enclosed by the pool with only the sky visible above. The private Brion family chapel completes the group of structures within the garden.
Practical information
- Access: the Memoriale is generally open to visitors between spring and autumn; current dates and any conditions of entry should be checked with FAI, the site’s managing body.
- Management: the property has been cared for by FAI, the Fondo Ambiente Italiano, since 2023.
- Setting: the site adjoins the working cemetery of Altivole and is entered through it.
Getting there
The Memoriale Brion lies in Altivole, in the province of Treviso, Veneto, next to the village cemetery. It can be located at approximately 45.7578° N, 11.9819° E; visitors travelling from Treviso or Venice should plan their route using current public transport or road information, as no specific transport details are given here.
Nearby
- Altivole village cemetery — immediately adjoining, separated from the Memoriale by a wall.
- Castelvecchio Museum, Verona — another major work by Carlo Scarpa, within the Veneto region.
- Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice — Scarpa’s 1963 renovation of a Venetian palace, also within the Veneto region.
Sources
- FAI – Fondo Ambiente Italiano
- MAXXI museum, Rome
- Fondazione Querini Stampalia, Venice
- Carlo Scarpa, “Come ho capito il Brion” (lecture, Madrid School of Architecture, 1978)
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