Cimitero Monumentale di Milano

Opened in the 1860s, Milan's Monumental Cemetery combines Carlo Maciachini's architecture with funerary sculpture by artists including Adolfo Wildt and Lucio Fontana. The Famedio contains the tomb of Alessandro Manzoni; Arturo Toscanini and Nobel laureates Salvatore Quasimodo and Dario Fo are also buried here.

Why it matters

When Milan consolidated its scattered churchyard burials into one grand cemetery in the 1860s, it commissioned an architect, Carlo Maciachini, and treated the result as a civic monument, not a utility. Built between 1864 and 1866 and owned by the City of Milan, the cemetery is non-denominational — a notable choice for the era — and grew into the richest ensemble of funerary sculpture in Lombardy, ranked by admirers among the great cemetery-museums of Italy alongside Turin, the Verano and Staglieno. Families competed in marble: Greek temples, obelisks, a reduced Trajan's Column and figurative groups by sculptors including Wildt, Medardo Rosso, Giacomo Manzù, Lucio Fontana and Giò Ponti turn the avenues into a survey of Italian taste from the 1860s to the twentieth century.

What to notice

The Famedio is a neo-medieval hall clad in marble and stone, with Alessandro Manzoni's tomb at its centre; Carla Fracci was the first woman interred there. The Jewish section, designed by Maciachini and opened in 1872, includes windows depicting the Twelve Tribes of Israel. The cemetery also contains the 1876 Crematorium Temple and the BBPR memorial to Milanese deportees to Nazi extermination camps.

Context and history

The cemetery belongs to the Ottocento reform movement that swept burials out of the city: Maciachini's design gathered the old burial grounds into one site at Piazzale Cimitero Monumentale, combining a monumental entrance, arcaded courtyards and landscaped ground. It quickly became the stage on which Milanese families displayed wealth and civic pride, and the sculpture catalogue reads as a who's who of artists, many of them also responsible for work elsewhere in the city. Alongside the artists and writers, the interred include the conductor Arturo Toscanini — whose shrine began as the tomb of his small son Giorgio, dead of diphtheria — Nobel laureates Salvatore Quasimodo and Dario Fo, the pianist Vladimir Horowitz, footballer Giuseppe Meazza, Herbert Kilpin, founder of A.C. Milan, and Hermann Einstein, father of Albert. The Civico Mausoleo Palanti extends the pantheon idea to meritorious citizens.