Italy's Most Beautiful Cemetery: Cimitero Monumentale di Staglieno
Nobody does sex and death like the Italians.
I’m a connoisseur of cemeteries. Not modern ones, which I find bleak and unromantic, but old ones, Italian ones. And few places stir me like Cimitero Monumentale di Staglieno in Genoa. It is the finest open-air museum in Europe.
We discovered it not by accident, but disaster. My daughter, Kate, had just graduated high school, and a trip to Sanremo, Nice, Eze, and Genoa was my present to her. I rented a suspiciously affordable Airbnb in Genoa, having no clue there wasn’t a single place to park. We got in late, we were tired, and we had suitcases. After mindlessly circling various parking lots (Kate: “One more time around the traffic circle, Mom, and I’m going to barf.”), I finally found a spot next to a tree. There weren’t any painted lines or traffic signs instructing me not to, so in my haplessly American way, I thought sure, this’ll work.
The next morning, our car was gone. We trudged around in the heat, looking forlornly for it, without so much as a drop of coffee to sustain us. These are the times that try men’s souls, I thought. Well, mine anyway.
Our car had been towed, of course. I’d parked in front of a tree that might have been a bus stop. Italians play this fun game where they just expect you to know stuff. No signs, no painted lines. Who can be bothered?
Kate was furious, but John and I had learned long ago to take it in stride, which made Kate even madder because, my God, how could we not be angry?
In Italy, there are things you can control (2%) and things you can’t control (1,000,000%). If you’re questioning my math, I assure you those numbers are correct.
It wasn’t noon yet, but the impound lot was already closed (this, too, is Italy), so we hoofed it over to this spot I’d recently read about: Cimitero Monuental di Staglieno, which I strongly urge you to visit, provided dead people don’t freak you out.
I love dead people. They’re so easy to talk to. And if we’re to be honest: no one gets out of here alive. No one. I know that’s supposed to scare me, but it doesn’t. This isn’t the garden-variety denial we all find necessary just to get up in the morning; it’s the truth. My truth. Death, while something I certainly don’t forward to, frightens me far less than the deaths of my friends and loved ones. Perhaps, this is why beautiful cemeteries have a polarizing effect on me. They remind me in a forceful way that I’m still powerfully alive.
And so it was with Cimitero Monuental di Staglieno. Every tomb and mausoleum had its own emotional gut punch. Lovers, mothers, children, the heart and soul of 19th century Genovese society are interred in that hill, their tragic stories rendered in marble. I know how tempting it is to relegate people of the past to “Other,” but they were just like we are, only better dressed and arguably better read. What we’re looking at is us, future version.
We err in believing we still have time, you see.
In a way, Napoleon is the guy to thank for the way Italy does cemeteries. Prior to his decree, Décret Impérial sur les Sépultures, otherwise known as the Edict of Saint-Cloud, Italians buried their dead in churches and town centers, much as the English do. For hygienic purposes, Napoleon’s new law forbade that, which led to beautiful walled cemeteries constructed on the outskirts of Italy’s villages, where some of the world’s best funerary art is displayed.
It’s the range of styles that I find so fascinating, from neoclassicism to realism; symbolism to art nouveau (the Italians call it “liberty”) and art deco. The construction of the cemetery, in 1835, was entrusted to renowned 19th century architect, Carlo Beraldino. Sadly, and not without irony, he soon died of cholera, which meant his pupil, Giovanni Resasco, took up the project, completing it in 1844.
Even as recently as a hundred years ago, Death sat constantly on the human shoulder. How many people died before their fifth birthday—or their twenty-fifth? It astonishes me how many promising young lives were cut short before the advent of simple penicillin. Wandering through that sculpture garden was the same as listening to elegiac poetry, tragic, yes, life-affirming, yes, but also a reminder that science, while imperfect, has saved a lot of lives.
In 1886, a Jewish cemetery was opened on the hill. A Greek Orthodox section opened in 1882, and a British/Protestant section in 1902, burnishing Genoa’s reputation as a city of religious tolerance, intellectualism, and multiculturalism. Those are three good things for any city to lay claim to.
Don’t let yourself be afraid of the dead. They have wisdom to share, if you will hear them.
A tiny snippet from Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray, 1750:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.
Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,
And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds.
Now its most famous stanza:
Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air.
Just a little reminder that life isn’t a dress rehearsal. Live it now or forever hold your peace.
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Copyright © 2022 Stacey Eskelin
A must-go place, thank you for recommending it. I often go to Genoa (my fil's family was originally from there before moving to Venice) but never got to visit this cemetery. Added to the list!
It used to be common practice for people to have picnics in cemeteries.
I think about my mother, about the fact that she's buried in a cemetery somewhere around Idaho Falls, ID, but I've no idea of which one. This has left me saddled with my father's ashes now for the past 7 years, and no idea what to do with them. I've considered going out there and first finding where my mother is buried, and then seeing if there was some way of interring my dad's ashes on or beside her grave. But that's a 1500 mile trip, and well outside the scope of my available resources.
There is a cemetery in Carbondale -- ~23 miles from where I live -- where Gen. John Logan held one of the first "official" Memorial day observations. Union, Confederate, and ex-slaves are buried there.