Only 100 trees have been planted so far of the 700 that are planned, facing the hospital’s morgue. “The Woods of Memory is a living monument, and it immediately seemed to us to be the most convincing, the most emotive and the one that was closest to our sentiments,” Bergamo Mayor Giorgio Gori said.
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One was too monumental the other ignored that so many dead were not officially counted due to lack of testing. Premier Mario Draghi stood among the first newly planted trees in Bergamo’s Trucca Park on March 18, the first anniversary of the indelible image of army trucks bringing dead to other cities for cremation after the city’s morgue was overwhelmed.īergamo’s mayor said the city considered proposals for statues or plaques bearing the names of the dead. Italy has not dedicated a national monument to its some 132,000 confirmed dead, but it has designated a coronavirus remembrance day. Both are emerging in the COVID-19 memorials. Memorials like the AIDS quilt and the Stumbling Stones have helped solidify a trend toward grass-roots remembrances and the desire to honor victims as individuals, Allen said. The quilt has grown to nearly 50,000 squares, representing more than 105,000 individuals. Not since the AIDS quilt made its way across the United States, with loved ones adding squares for people who had succumbed, has a health crisis been the object of memorials of a scale like those now honoring the COVID-19 dead. They span big, traditional monuments like Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, and more personalized tributes where victims are named, like the so-called Stumbling Stones outside buildings were Jews lived before the Holocaust. Holocaust memorials were the next major testaments to mass killing, Allen said. “That is why we talk about the lost generation.” “It was a period of mass death,” Allen said. That pandemic seems to have been little memorialized, partly because of the keen focus on the war dead. Memorial flags, hearts, ribbons: These simple objects have stood in for virus victims, representing lost lives in eye-catching memorials from London to Washington D.C., and Brazil to South Africa. Everywhere, the task of creating collective memorials is fraught, with the pandemic far from vanquished and new dead still being mourned. Some have been drawn from artist’s ideas or civic group proposals, but others are spontaneous displays of grief and frustration. BERGAMO, Italy (AP) - The Italian city that suffered the brunt of COVID-19’s first deadly wave is dedicating a vivid memorial to the pandemic dead: A grove of trees, creating oxygen in a park opposite the hospital where so many died, unable to breathe.īergamo, in northern Italy, is among the many communities around the globe dedicating memorials to commemorate lives lost in a pandemic that is nearing the terrible threshold of 5 million confirmed dead.