Cimitero Monumentale di Torino

North of the railway yards, Turin keeps a second city: avenues of cypress and marble where the Risorgimento's politicians, writers, scientists and the footballers of the Grande Torino lie under chapels and angels. The Monumental Cemetery has been called an open-air museum, and the label fits, but its avenues and monuments reflect generations of civic memory.

Why it matters

Known in its early decades simply as the "Generale", the cemetery earned the name Monumentale because of what generations of families and sculptors built there. Its tombs, chapels and porticoed galleries assemble the styles of two centuries — neoclassical restraint, eclectic revival, and the floral turbulence of Liberty — in a single great enclosure of memory.

The register of the buried reads like the index of an Italian cultural history: statesmen Massimo d'Azeglio and Vincenzo Gioberti; writers Silvio Pellico, Edmondo De Amicis, Carolina Invernizio, Mario Soldati and Primo Levi; scientists Cesare Lombroso, Galileo Ferraris and Rita Levi Montalcini; industrialists Francesco Cirio, Battista "Pinin" Farina with the Pininfarina family, and Vittorio Valletta; singers and film figures such as Francesco Tamagno, Erminio Macario and Fred Buscaglione; and the players of the Grande Torino, the great football side lost at Superga in 1949. Rosa Vercellana, the "bela Rosin", morganatic wife of King Vittorio Emanuele II, rests here too.

What to notice

The first galleries contain carved portals and devotional reliefs, an anthology of workshop styles from across the nineteenth century. Beyond, the avenues open and the great family chapels stage their own architecture — miniature temples, Egyptian tombs, Art Nouveau bronzes.

Notable burials include the Grande Torino memorial, the writer and Auschwitz survivor Primo Levi, journalist Carlo Casalegno, victims of the Cinema Statuto fire and workers killed in the ThyssenKrupp disaster, as well as figures from sport and entertainment.

The grounds include sections for the Jewish community, the Waldensian church, religious orders and military bodies, as well as the Tempio Crematorio and the Luogo del Ricordo scattering garden.

Context and history

The cemetery was created in the nineteenth century, when post-Napoleonic hygiene law moved burials outside the city walls, and it grew with Turin through the capital decades and the industrial twentieth century. Wartime left marks here as everywhere in the city: the complex was hit in the RAF bombing raid of the night of 13 July 1943, the same raid that damaged San Lorenzo and other landmarks. As the town expanded, the once-peripheral ground found itself inside the urban fabric, bordered by the districts of Regio Parco and Barca.