There are cemeteries you pass through quietly, and then there is the Cimitero Monumentale di Staglieno, a place you enter almost as you would a museum.
Spread across some 330,000 square meters on the hills east of Genoa, Staglieno is not merely a burial ground but one of Europe’s most extraordinary open-air gal leries of sculpture, architecture and emotion.
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Created in the mid-19th centu ry, Staglieno was born out of ne cessity.
When burials within and around churches were banned in 1832, Italy’s cities were forced to rethink how they housed their dead.
In wealthy, cosmopolitan Genoa, the answer was ambi tious.
Architect Carlo Barabino was commissioned to design a monumental cemetery worthy of the city’s mercantile pride and cultural refinement.
He would not live to see its opening in 1851, succumbing to the cholera epidemic of 1835, but his vision endured.
His pupil Giovanni Bat tista Resasco completed the pro ject, setting a “Mediterranean” cemetery style that would later influence sites across Europe.
Death here is not hidden or sanitized; it is confronted with tenderness, theatricality and astonishing craftsmanship.
The cemetery’s Pantheon-like central chapel, originally the Cappella dei Suffragi, rises amid this sea of stone as both spiritual anchor and architectural focal point.
lies Constance Lloyd, wife of Os car Wilde, adding a quiet literary footnote to the landscape.
For photographers and art lov ers, Staglieno is endlessly gen erous.
Light filters through the porticoes, softening marble into something almost human.
Guid ed tours, such as the celebrated “100 Women” itinerary, reveal how the cemetery chronicles fe male life from childhood to old age through 19th- and 20th-cen tury sculpture.
Staglieno does not trade on royal names or global celebrity.
Instead, it tells a more intimate Italian story.
Among its notable graves are those of philosopher and patriot Giuseppe Mazzini, a key figure of the Risorgimento, and beloved Genoese singer-song writer Fabrizio De André.
The cemetery also includes distinct English, Protestant and Jewish sections, reflecting Genoa’s his toric role as an outward-looking port city.
In the English cemetery
Free to enter and rarely crowd ed, Staglieno remains one of Genoa’s most underrated treas ures.
It is a place that challeng es our relationship with death, replacing fear with awe, and reminding visitors that remem brance, when shaped by art, can be profoundly life-affirming
What distinguishes Staglieno is its unapologetic beauty.
Long arcaded galleries shelter tombs adorned with angels, allegorical figures, grieving widows and en tire family scenes frozen in mar
Fonte: Allora! n. 277, 30 gennaio 2026, pagina 23.
