Cimitero Monumentale di Staglieno

Opened in 1851, the Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno spreads across the hillside above Genoa's Bisagno valley. Carlo Barabino designed its plan in 1835; after his death, Giovanni Battista Resasco continued the work. Arcaded galleries, monumental tombs and planted slopes make it a major setting for nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ligurian sculpture.

Why it matters

Staglieno joins the history of burial, public architecture and sculpture in modern Genoa. Its galleries and terraces became an open-air museum of funerary art, while the cemetery remains an active place of remembrance. Writers and public figures who visited it helped establish its international reputation.

What to notice

The central axis leads to the Pantheon, also known as the Cappella dei Suffragi, while long arcades follow the hillside. The Boschetto Irregolare, designed in the manner of a Romantic English garden, contains graves of figures associated with the Risorgimento, including members of the Thousand. Funerary sculpture ranges from idealised figures to detailed portraits of ordinary people. Among those buried here are Giuseppe Mazzini, Nino Bixio, Fabrizio De André and Constance Mary Lloyd, Oscar Wilde's wife.

Context and history

Napoleonic-era hygiene reforms moved burials outside city walls, prompting Genoa to commission a new cemetery on the Staglieno hillside. Barabino began the design in 1835, and Resasco continued it; the cemetery opened to the public on 1 January 1851. Genoese families commissioned elaborate monuments through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, making the galleries a record of local sculptural traditions as well as a working cemetery.