Until 1937 the cemetery of Azul was entered through a neoclassical peristyle. Francisco Salamone replaced it with a concrete wall forty-three metres wide and twenty-one metres high, inaugurated in 1938 and built by the firm SADOP. The scale is the point: the towns of the Buenos Aires pampa rarely rose above five metres, and Salamone's public works routinely reached thirty. Spanish Wikipedia reads his cemetery portals as figures of the body returning to the earth, and this one carries a monumental concrete angel of death guarding the entrance and the letters R.I.P. at giant size across the front. Nothing about it answers to its surroundings, which is exactly what its author intended: English Wikipedia describes his manner as Art Deco functionalism crossed with Italian Futurism at vast scale. It was declared a National Historic Monument by Decree 1138 of 2014, together with the Plaza San Martín and the municipal slaughterhouse of the same town.
Salamone built more than sixty public works in twenty-five municipalities between 1936 and 1940, and all of them were commissioned under one provincial administration: that of Manuel Fresco, governor of Buenos Aires Province for the conservative Partido Demócrata Nacional and financed through the province's public works bond law. Spanish Wikipedia records that Fresco supported the 1930 coup that opened the Década Infame, that he declared the Communist Party illegal, and that in speeches he praised the totalitarian regimes of Hitler and Mussolini, whose busts stood in his office. It also records that the February 1940 election of his chosen successor was carried by "an oiled mechanism of fraud", and that President Roberto M. Ortiz responded by intervening in the province and annulling the result. English Wikipedia notes that Salamone's town halls recalled both the Italian medieval palazzi comunali and the designs of Mussolini's Italy.
Wikidata Q63444507 · Commons: Portal del cementerio de Azul.jpg · Photo: Mrtngrsbch · Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0