Lodi, Mauri's Plant Cathedral torn down. It lasted only two years and had cost 300,000 euros

The Lodi Vegetable Cathedral, the imposing vegetal architecture designed by Lodi artist Giuliano Mauri (Lodi Vecchio, 1938 - Lodi, 2009), one of Italy’s leading exponents of environmental art, has been permanently torn down. The work, consisting of 108 wooden columns each 1.20 meters in diameter, was a building 18 meters high, 72 meters long, and 22.48 meters wide: costing 300 thousand euros, it had been inaugurated on April 24, 2017, as a tribute the city had wanted to pay to its great sculptor. Unfortunately, only two years after its inauguration, the monument was already in a severe state of disrepair, and as of April this year only twenty-eight of the cathedral’s columns remained standing: the others had been decimated by bad weather, neglect, and wood affections. And for the past year, for security reasons, the Vegetable Cathedral had not been accessible.

Appeals addressed to the Leghist administration therefore fell on deaf ears, and the indignation of Francesca Regorda, Mauri’s granddaughter and curator of the project, who already in the spring had asked that Mauri’s name no longer be associated with the work, which Regorda had called a “pile of rubble” (the municipality had removed the signage and references to the artist to respect the family’s desire to protect the artist’s name), was to no avail.

To date, only thirteen columns were left standing, all of which were knocked down by bulldozers on Christmas Eve. The demolition was ordered by the junta led by mayor Sara Casanova (League), who in any case already in April had made no secret of her desire to “ensure the safety of the area and reopen in a short time the bicycle path that connects Lodi to Boffalora dAdda,” as an official note read (the path will be reopened in January): to do so, the intention was “to remove the few remaining columns, safeguarding the essences that had been planted inside them.” Also in April, Culture Councillor Lorenzo Maggi had expressed his willingness to find funding to rebuild the Vegetable Cathedral, but a few days ago, on December 26, Giuliano Mauri’s heirs decided “not to proceed with the project of reconstruction in Lodi of the Vegetable Cathedral.”

Former Lodi culture alderman Andrea Ferrari is deeply embittered, commenting on Facebook on the matter: “Lodi’s Vegetal Cathedral no longer exists. It has been wounded, too many times, without ever being cared for by anyone. It has been left to itself without anyone intervening.” He adds, “No one has been explained anything. No one was told why in the summer of 2018 when the first columns were giving the first signs of failure no one intervened. A Local Police tape was simply laid around the Cathedral, just as we are used to seeing at crime scenes. And then until the end of 2019 there was nothing but the preparation of administrative papers to commission a company to permanently tear down the work. And as if, while a patient is in the hospital, doctors decide never to intervene from the first symptoms of illness except to start contacting the funeral home company in the meantime. For so many Lodians and for so many people who had visited and loved the Cathedral, it is a sad day. Many will perhaps use the felling to speculate politically. Personally, I only hope that the same bipartisan spirit that had made it possible to realize the work and to inaugurate it in the presence of important institutional figures who now govern the City will once again prevail, and that all together we can think about how to restore, in new forms and ways, a work that had also served as a great tourist flywheel for our beautiful City.”

Lodi’s Vegetal Cathedral was the third building of its kind: the first Vegetal Cathedral was built when the artist was still alive, in 2001, in the woods of Arte Sella, the event held every year in Borgo Valsugana, and it is also the only one that still survives. The second, as well as the first one built as a posthumous tribute, was in Oltre il Colle (Bergamo), built in 2010, and was demolished in 2018 after a cloudburst irreversibly devastated it. The third was the one in Lodi that was built as a tribute of the city to its artist.

Pictured: the Lodi Vegetable Cathedral when it was still healthy.

Lodi, Mauri's Plant Cathedral torn down. It lasted only two years and had cost 300,000 euros

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