The Cimitero di San Cataldo is an extraordinary work of architecture by Aldo Rossi, designed in 1971 and still under construction — a peculiarity that is part of its character. Rossi designed the cemetery as a kind of ghost city: streets of ossuary buildings, a cone-shaped communal grave, a cube-shaped ossuary with open windows and no roof, and a long central axis that organises everything with an unsettling rationality.
The imagery is deliberately strange — the windowed cube, in particular, looks like a house stripped of its interior, a building for the dead that mirrors the living city around it. Rossi called it a city of the dead, and the resemblance to an empty urban neighbourhood is intentional and effective. It is one of the most visited pieces of Italian architecture from the second half of the 20th century and belongs on any serious architectural itinerary of Emilia-Romagna.