The Brion memorial, donated to FAI by Ennio and Donatella Brion, was commissioned in 1969 by their mother, Onorina Brion Tomasin, in memory of her late husband, Giuseppe Brion, the founder and owner of Brionvega, a leading electronic design company in the post-war period who was born in San Vito di Altivole. It was architect Carlo Scarpa’s last work, and one of his most complex and meaningful. Built between 1970 and 1978, when Scarpa died in Japan, it was completed in accordance with his designs: a wealth of 1,500 signed drawings documenting every tiny detail of the monument.
The funerary complex is set in the countryside of Treviso, with the hills of Asolo in the background on the outskirts of the village of San Vito d’Altivole near the small cemetery which leads to a monumental entrance (the propilei) with a façade in the shape of two intersecting rings, a symbol of the marital love that inspired the project. Inside, a raised area of 2,200 sqm is bordered by a sloping wall that allows a view of the surrounding countryside. Four buildings rise amidst lawns dotted with green and featuring channels and covered pools of waterlilies in geometrical shapes that evoke Islamic paradises and Japanese gardens. The fulcrum of the complex is the “arcosolium”, a cement arch whose inner surface is covered with gilded glass tiles, that covers the sarcophagi of Giuseppe and Onorina Brion whose sloping surfaces symbolically reach out to the other for eternity.
A meditation pavilion rises from water with a view of the arcosolium; on the other side is the family tomb and the chapel or small temple used for funerals which can be accessed from outside the complex and is surrounded by water and a garden of cypress trees. To one side, between the private memorial and the public cemetery, is the tomb of Carlo Scarpa himself and his wife Nini Lazzari, created by their architect son Tobia (with Fabio Lombardo).
