The complex was commissioned in 1969 by Onorina Tomasin Brion after the sudden death of her husband Giuseppe Brion, founder of the Vicenza-based electronics company Brionvega. Construction began in 1970 on a 2,400 m² plot annexed to the municipal cemetery of Altivole and continued for eight years, supported by almost two thousand drawings by Scarpa himself. The memorial is organised in an inverted L-shape that wraps around the existing village cemetery and is enclosed by a perimeter wall inclined sixty degrees inwards. It is composed of five built elements in reinforced concrete: the propylaea at the entrance from the cemetery, the arcosolium covering the sarcophagi of the Brion couple, a chapel set within a reflecting pool, a family edicule against the northern wall, and the meditation pavilion suspended above the water.

“This is the only work I go to see willingly, because I feel I have grasped the sense of the countryside, as the Brion family wanted. Everyone goes there with great affection; children play, dogs run: all cemeteries should be made like this.”

Carlo Scarpa, lecture in Madrid, 1978

Scarpa’s architectural language is fully deployed at Altivole. Reinforced concrete is treated decoratively, with cast textures and the recurring motif of two interlocking circles — one lined with blue mosaic, the other with rose — placed at the propylaea as a figure of conjugal union. Mosaic, bronze, ebony and Venetian glass details, executed in part by the artisan Eugenio De Luigi, alternate with water as a reflective element and with formal references that Scarpa drew from Venetian craft tradition, Islamic gardens and Japanese architecture. The visitor is led along an obligatory sequence that proceeds from the propylaea to the arcosolium and the chapel and finally to the meditation pavilion, where a door operated by a hidden system of cables and pulleys descends into the water to close the space.

Scarpa died in 1978 in Sendai, Japan, before the complex was complete. At the request of his son Tobia, the architect was buried at the point of junction between the memorial and the old village cemetery; the works were concluded following Scarpa’s own sketches. In 2018 Ennio Brion commissioned a conservative restoration directed by Guido Pietropoli, a pupil of Scarpa who had followed the original construction; the work lasted three years and drew on the 2,200 original drawings preserved at the MAXXI archive in Rome. In 2022 Ennio and Donatella Brion donated the memorial to FAI – Fondo per l’Ambiente Italiano, which has since operated the site as one of its properties.