viale, commemorativo/ai caduti della prima guerra mondiale, Parco della Rimembranza di Lerici

A rectangular plot of land on a gentle slope, enclosed by a dry-stone wall just over two metres high. This is the Parco della Rimembranza di Lerici, a former cemetery repurposed as a memorial park. The entrance is a masonry portal with wrought-iron gates, flanked by two cypresses; inside, a ramp of cobbled steps leads down between low walls.

Following Napoleonic decrees of 1805, burials were moved outside town centres. Lerici’s old cemetery, established uphill in 1906, was closed when full at the century’s end. In 1927, it was transformed into a commemorative park, planted with straight rows of young holm oaks and box hedges in the Italian garden style. Thirty-five ilex trees were set, one for each of Lerici’s fallen in the First World War, each ‘supported by tricolour props with brass plaques remembering the Glorious’. The holm oak, ilex, gives the town its name, a ‘symbol of strength and perennial vitality’. Within, the graves remain, often accompanied by finely crafted funerary monuments. A quiet, layered place: cemetery, then garden, then memorial.

Description via source. Coordinates and heritage data from the Atika atlas.