Cimitero di Casoria-Arzano-Casavatore

Good service

STORIES OF HANDS AND FACES IN THE CITY OF PEACE The corruption and building speculation that in the past decades have spread to the city of Casoria bring to mind the 1963 film “Le mani sul città” by Francesco Rosi, which could also be filmed here. But in Casoria there are other "hands", real and monumental, which denounce other social wounds and which offer themselves to the sight of those who go to the consortium cemetery of Casoria-Casavatore-Arzano. "Requiem for the Land of Fires" is the title of the monumental bas-relief, 7.5 m high, which stands out to the right of the entrance to the city of the dead. It was created in 2013 by the artist Antonio Manfredi, since 2005 director of the Contemporary Art Museum of Casoria (CAM), to commemorate the numerous victims of the ecological catastrophe that poisoned the territories north of Naples, causing what has been defined a real and just "ecocide". His are also the other "hands", this time in bronze, located in the inner courtyard of the building that houses the headquarters of the Consortium. This is the work "My hands for Lampedusa" (2013), 4 meters high, dedicated to the memory of the 365 victims of the shipwreck of 3 October 2013 in the Strait of Sicily. The last work of contemporary art present in situ, also by the master Manfredi, has been standing on the top of the Mother Church since 6 July 2015 (founded in 1837, with a square plan and two massive and solemn Doric columns at the entrance): it is a cross of perforated steel, 3 meters high, with the image of Christ in negative. The silhouette of Christ on the cross is instead positioned on the building at the entrance to the cemetery. But whoever crosses the "Gate of Peace", as indicated by the Latin inscription on the pavement at the entrance ("JANUA SUM PACIS"), in addition to these extraordinary works of contemporary art, can come across a gallery of faces, chapels and funerary monuments full of stories. An emblematic example of this is the noble chapel, with its romantically decadent charm, where Simone De Luca, Daniele and Amalia Frauenfelder, descendants of a Franco-German family, are buried. On the tomb of Amalia (Naples, 1866 - Sorrento, 1908) there is a statue of a woman lying on her side, reminiscent of the recumbent figures typical of the sarcophagi found in the Etruscan necropolis. Some visitors to the cemetery have the custom of bringing flowers or small votive gifts, due to the belief that this woman has the power to put them in contact with God or with deceased loved ones. Another chapel is the one dedicated to Santa Maria Cristina Brando, where her "daughters" rest, reminiscent of the facade covered with exposed tuff the Church of the Sacramentine Sisters built by the Saint in the center of Casoria. In the tower building known as the "old skyscraper" there is, instead, the chapel dedicated to San Ludovico da Casoria with the altar decorated with a marble slab, placed there in 2014, with the effigy of the Casorian Saint considered the "Saint Francis of the nineteenth century "and at the base of the slab there is precisely remembered the famous phrase of St. Francis of Assisi" So much man knows how much he works ". Walking along the silent avenues of the cemetery (built starting in 1820 and inaugurated in 1837), one is impressed by the quantity and variety of shapes and styles of the chapels erected in almost two centuries, many of which embellished with sculptures and bas-reliefs (for example those of Sweater, Capone, Muto-De Vita). Among the numerous busts of illustrious personalities, the marble monument stands out on the left beyond the entrance, dedicated by the City of Casoria to Mauro Mitilini, the carabiniere who was killed in service in 1991 in an attempt to stop a gang of criminals (in the Villa Comunale there is the bronze bust).