The complex stands on the edge of San Vito, a hamlet of Altivole, in the upper Treviso plain at the foot of the Asolo hills.

The landscape is the agricultural one of the Veneto foothills: cultivated fields, rows of trees, short horizons closed to the north by the hills of Asolo.

The memorial does not stand in isolation: it wraps around two sides, in an L shape, of the small municipal cemetery, reached by a
tree-lined avenue through the fields.

This setting, at once rural and liminal, is an essential part of the work.

A funerary garden that measures itself against the sky and the plain more than against any building.

The memorial was commissioned in 1969 by Onorina Brion Tomasin for her husband Giuseppe Brion, founder of Brionvega, the company whose name was tied to the celebrated radio and television sets of Italian design.

Carlo Scarpa worked on it from 1970 until his death in 1978, following a fall in Sendai, Japan; the construction was completed on the basis of his working drawings.

It is his last work and the one to which he chose to bind his own memory.

The essential facts: approximately 2,200 square metres of raised lawn, enclosed by concrete walls sloping inwards, crossed by water channels and pools covered with water lilies.

There are four architectural episodes: the entrance propylaea, marked by the famous window of two interlocking circles; the arcosolium, a lowered concrete bridge lined on its underside with glass tesserae on a gold ground, beneath which rest the two sarcophagi of the couple, inclined towards one another; the meditation pavilion suspended over the water and the chapel, also used for the village's services.

Everything is designed according to Scarpa's vocabulary: ziggurat-like stepped profiles in concrete, double circles, joints that keep materials separate, a millimetric control of detail placed at the service of a symbolic journey through water, threshold and farewell.

In 2022 the heirs Ennio and Donatella Brion donated the complex to FAI – Fondo per l'Ambiente Italiano, becoming its seventieth property.

Since then the memorial has been regularly open to visitors.

Considered among the pinnacles of twentieth-century architecture, the Brion Memorial remains an almost unique case: a private funerary monument that is at once a public space, a garden and the spiritual testament of its author.