Dolente Immagine

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Dolente Immagine

Overview

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Dolente Immagine (Sorrowful Image) is an investigation about the themes of death and mortality from an historical and visual point of view.

Though today is quite difficult to deal with death-related topics due to cultural reasons (especially in the modern western world), death and mortality have always communicated themselves through images and modalities that have changed during centuries.

The project is composed by two books: one focused on the historical research, and the other one dedicated to a photographic and typographic journey through the Osservanza Cemetery in Faenza, Italy.
The lettering of the book cover is based on a recurring typographic style found on the tombstones.

A typographic journey

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The Osservanza Cemetery in Faenza is a monumental cemetery founded in 1816. The actual 200 years life of the necropolis are very visible through the stratification of different typographic styles, decorations, pictures and epithaps.

During a 4 months exploration of the site, I attempted to catalogue some the most recurring letters on tombstones, finding a rich and endless typographic ecosystem.

I managed to reconstruct 30 alphabets, although these covered just a fraction of the specimen found: most of the examples were related one to another due to the artisanal nature of cemeterial typography and displayed slightly variations that made cataloging an almost impossible task.