Camposanto Monumentale di Pisa

The long marble cloister closing Piazza del Duomo to the north is a cemetery like no other: earth reputedly carried back from Golgotha by crusader ships, fourteenth-century visions of death and judgement on its walls, and the tombs of professors and princes beneath your feet. Badly burned in 1944, the Camposanto has been patiently brought back to life.

Why it matters

Founded in 1277 under Archbishop Federico Visconti, the Camposanto was the last monument to rise on the square, and its purpose was civic order as much as piety: to gather tombs scattered around the cathedral into a place, in the archbishop's conception, that was spacious, dignified, secluded and enclosed. It became one of the earliest medieval Christian architectures conceived entirely for the cult of the dead, a court-sized reliquary of soil from Palestine. Over the centuries it absorbed the graves of university professors and Medici family members, turning into Pisa's own pantheon, and in the early nineteenth century its conservator Carlo Lasinio made it one of the first public museums in Europe by collecting sculpture and painting from suppressed religious houses.

What to notice

Enter through the doorway on the square and the noise of Pisa stops at the threshold. The central courtyard, green and scented with the beds of the old graveyard, held the sarcophagi of Roman and medieval worthies; humbler burials lie beneath the corridor floors. Walk the bays in order. The great cycle of the fourteenth century unfolds themes of life and death shaped by Dominican preaching and Dante's visions, with Bonamico Buffalmacco's Triumph of Death and Last Judgement as the pivot; Francesco Traini worked alongside this current. Later walls carry the Stories of the Pisan saints by Andrea Bonaiuti, Antonio Veneziano and Spinello Aretino, and the Old Testament cycle begun by Taddeo Gaddi and Piero di Puccio, which Benozzo Gozzoli carried to completion in the mid-fifteenth century. The Triumph of Death, the best-preserved of all the scenes, has been returned to its original position after decades of study and repair.

Context and history

Tradition fixed the cemetery's holiness from the start: soil from Golgotha, brought to Pisa in 1146 during the crusading years, was spread over the ground so that the Pisan dead might rest in sacred earth. The marble enclosure dates from 1277 onward, and across the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries its walls became the largest fresco theatre in Tuscany after the Assisi and Florence cycles. From the sixteenth century the corridors filled with the monuments of the University's professors and the Medici court. The darkest chapter came in the summer of 1944, when fire from wartime bombing fused lead and scorched paint across the walls; the recovery that followed, detaching what could be saved, revealed the sinopie, the painters' preparatory drawings on the first plaster layer, now displayed in their own museum on the square. Restorers have worked bay by bay ever since, and the long, slow history of conservation is itself part of the monument's modern story.