The monumental cemetery of sculptures
In the valley of the Bisagno river, on the hills north east of the centre of Genoa, the Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno is one of the largest cemeteries in Europe and one of the most extraordinary open-air museums of nineteenth and twentieth century sculpture. Opened in 1851, to a design by Carlo Barabino and Giovanni Battista Resasco, it extends over about 33 hectares, with long porticoes, galleries, chapels and a large neoclassical Pantheon, while the upper part, the "boschetto irregolare", is a romantic wood with tombs scattered among the trees.
The cemetery was the pride of the rich Genoese bourgeoisie of the nineteenth century, who commissioned the best sculptors of the time to create sumptuous funerary monuments in marble, in a realist style that depicts with incredible precision faces, clothes, lace, hair and the grief of the family members, and later in Art Nouveau and Symbolist styles, with weeping angels, allegories of death and eternity and scenes of farewell. One of the most famous is the statue of Caterina Campodonico, a poor seller of peanuts and doughnuts, who saved all her life to have her own statue carved, by Lorenzo Orengo in 1881, among those of the rich. Among the illustrious people buried here are the patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, Constance Lloyd, the wife of Oscar Wilde, and the singer-songwriter Fabrizio De André. Many writers and travellers, from Mark Twain to Nietzsche and Evelyn Waugh, were fascinated by it.
Tip: pick up a map at the entrance to find the most famous monuments; visit in the morning light, which brings out the details of the marble.
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