As we progressed south through Serbia and Bulgaria, we started to see a fashion for pre-booking grave spaces. The his ‘n’ her graves have been a bit thought-provoking, but in Apricena we find a huge newly-built mausoleum where you can reserve as many slots, for as many generations, as you want.
Having seen a couple with their fronts off, I can tell you that each slot is a concrete bunker-ette which is about 8’x2’x2′ with an electricity supply in case you want to install an Everlasting Flame of Memory (as long as your everloving family stump up the money) or maybe an I’m Not Dead button in case of a poor medical diagnosis.
You can buy the space you want, install the memorial you want, the only limit is your budget. Taste is not, apparently, an issue. Multi-story facilities are on offer, looking spookily like mass-produced Italian and Spanish beach resorts in the 70’s and 80’s.
As I cycled away I heard a distant voice: “We hear that in Serbia they publish notices of deaths in landscape format, and in Bulgaria they use portrait format. Here in Italy we have very fine A3 colour printer so we can print notices in landscape format but still include portraits. We will not invade their countries and kill them because of this, oh no, because we are a great trading nation, so we will sell them the printers at a low price and then charge them a fortune for toner cartridges.”
