The grave of Mario Rigoni Stern.

“In the last days of October, in the afternoon just returned from school, instead of going up to the roccoli (…) we went in small crowds to the cemetery to weed the graves of our relatives (…) In the afternoon of November 1, many candles were lit on the graves, portraits of the dead buried there were also placed in clear view, and garlands entwined with ivy branches, and tin flowers glazed in bright colors (…) in the evening of the 1st and 2nd of November no one left the house, not even the most avid card players (…) Maybe today all is more trivial. The cemetery was greatly enlarged because all the new rich people want the family tomb or the chapel, with polished marbles, and statues, and bright lights; graves with small cultivated flowerbeds are very few because almost all have marble slabs and plastic flowers. ”

From “Tra le due guerre” (Between the two wars), “Il giorno dei morti” (“The All Soul’s Day”)

Dying on spring

Mario was not afraid of death, “I know the life has to end, but I do not live this awareness with distress,” he told me when I interviewed him for his 85th birthday. “If anything can scare me, it is the physical suffering, because sometimes the pain humiliates, it does not even let a man a chance to think. But mine is an age that must be addressed by having the consciousness of the limit.”

In Rigoni Stern, on the other hand, death has always been closely intertwined to life, at least because of the coincidence that he had come into the world (and thus celebrated the birthday) right on 1st November (1921), the All Soul’s Day. And he died, as he wished, after having enjoyed the spring one last time.

Mario was regular at the cemetery, where he wandered among the graves remembering family members and neighbours who were gone, among nostalgia, affection and even some smile, as in the short story mentioned, in the episode of the kids who went from tomb to tomb to collect the melted wax of the candles to wax their skis.

“In my country ‘Spoon River’ I meet the missing people and I relive their forgotten stories,” he told me in another interview. In one of his last books, “Stagioni” (Seasons), he just told “a walk in the Cemetery in a spring day,” among the graves of his parents and the old teacher, siblings and friends who have gone before him, the “girls with whom I hunted butterflies” and the “communal guard that made us run when we were too intrusive.” “All this,” he wrote, “is not heavy; it is instead finding memories and sweet melancholy, not evil or annoying memories, or anger feelings, or regret for possible wrongs suffered.” What remains, after all, is the sincere affection and the forgiving attitude that, even in moments of bitterness and misunderstanding that have been reserved to him as well, he always had for his people. A deep and comfortable feel of community that is one of his most precious heritages.

The place

Mario died on June 16, 2008, in his bed, after some months of illness. For his precise arrangement the news of the death was spread only after the funeral took place, two days later. He is buried in the cemetery south of the town, under a great marble cross that he himself wanted to recover from the tomb of his paternal grandfather Giovanni Antonio, and in front of a small cultivated flowerbed, as he liked.