Situated in the central Italian region of Umbria, Gubbio is one of the country’s most important medieval cities. It has a monumental cemetery, built on academicist criteria, that has recently been enlarged with a construction that is closed and compact, but engages with its urban context and the surrounding landscape.

While the arrangement in rows is an allusion to the typical furrows of the local plantations, the distribution in streets and squares bordered by a powerful boundary suggests the idea that the expansion, far from being subject to the geometric dictates of the old graveyard, is treated as an organism that is an entity on its own, a city in itself.

In this city of the dead a key role is played by the series of public spaces that connect with the grid of inner streets, places where concrete clad in travertine makes a strong impression, and that are intended for respite and reflection. These are ‘squares of silence’: cubic enclosures inspired in works of James Turrell and that, like them, poetically frame or create windows to the sky. Renowned Italian artists have participated in these ‘skyspaces’, including Sauro Cardinali and Nicola Renzi, with site-specific installations that are integrated with the architecture and that interact with the changing atmospheres produced by the light, from dawn to dusk.