It is the most underrated monument in Genoa among Italian travellers, but for at least a century the great European travellers have known it is one of the city’s unmissable places. The Staglieno Monumental Cemetery, described by Ernest Hemingway as “one of the wonders of the world”, visited and written about by Mark Twain (The Innocents Abroad 1869) and by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (a regular in the 1880s), is a genuine open-air museum of European sculpture between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Designed by Carlo Barabino in 1835, completed by his pupil Giovanni Battista Resasco and opened to the public on 2 January 1851, it covers 33 hectares of neoclassical porticoes, chapels in Gothic, Neo-Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Liberty styles, and over 1,500 monumental tombs signed by the leading Italian sculptors of the period (Monteverde, Bistolfi, Rivalta, Orengo). Here rest Giuseppe Mazzini, Constance Lloyd Wilde (wife of Oscar Wilde) and Fabrizio De André, together with thousands of figures of Genoese and Italian history. Free admission, open every day.
Where it is
The address is Piazzale Resasco 2, 16137 Genoa, in the Bisagno Valley, about 4 km from the old town (15 minutes by car, 25-30 by bus from the centre). The cemetery occupies a broad basin on the slopes of the Staglieno hill, on the right bank of the Bisagno torrent.
How to get there:
- AMT buses: lines 12, 14, 34, 48 — “Cimitero di Staglieno” or “Piazzale Resasco” stops (every 5-15 minutes, 15-25 minutes from the centre);
- By car: free parking at Piazzale Resasco (access from Via Bobbio or Via Gavotti);
- On foot from Brignole station: 30-35 minutes along Via Tortona, Via Canevari, Via Bobbio (a feasible walk for those wanting a half-day out).
The cemetery is still an active burial ground (funerals and burials take place daily). A free map is available at the entrance for visitors, with suggested routes and the locations of the most important tombs. For deeper exploration, the staff of the Monumental Cemetery Office organise themed guided tours (by booking, also for groups).
The origin: the Edict of Saint-Cloud and Carlo Barabino
The cemetery was born from a French legislative act: the Edict of Saint-Cloud of 12 June 1804, issued by Napoleon Bonaparte, which forbade burials inside churches and urban centres throughout the Empire on hygienic grounds. The edict remained in force after the Restoration (1815) and required cities to build extra-urban cemeteries.
In Genoa, after decades of provisional burials in the first suburban cemeteries (Manesseno, Carbonara), in 1835 the City decided to build a great monumental cemetery that would also be a “city of the dead” worthy of the great city of the living. The project was entrusted to Carlo Barabino (1768-1835), the city’s leading Neoclassical architect, author of the Carlo Felice Opera House (1828), of the San Benigno cemetery, and of many public palaces and infrastructures.
Barabino designed a monumental and classical cemetery, on a Greek-cross plan, with great Neoclassical porticoes for the aristocratic and bourgeois tombs. The central space was to host a great civic building — a Pantheon — modelled on the Panthéon in Paris. But Barabino died in 1835, a victim of the cholera epidemic that struck the city in those months. He did not even see the start of the works.
Giovanni Battista Resasco and the opening (1851)
The project passed to Barabino’s collaborator and pupil, Giovanni Battista Resasco (Genoa 1798 — 1872), the city architect who worked at the cemetery from 1835 until his death. Resasco inherited Barabino’s drawings and revised them: he kept the overall Neoclassical layout but gave up the central Pantheon in favour of a smaller hall, simplified some decorative modules and organised the porticoes more functionally.
Works proceeded from 1844 with technical and financial difficulties (the site is hilly, with clay soil, hard to found). The cemetery was opened to the public on 2 January 1851 — the conventional birth date of Staglieno. The entrance square is today named after Resasco (Piazzale Giovanni Battista Resasco), in recognition of his decisive role in completing the work.
Over the following decades the cemetery was extended several times: the Boschetti were added (the green area above the monumental cemetery), the Soldiers’ Field, the evangelical and Jewish sections, and the modern New Cemetery. Today the whole complex covers 33 hectares.
An encyclopaedia of styles: from Neoclassical to Liberty
What makes Staglieno unique in the world is the variety of architectural and sculptural styles represented in its thousands of monumental tombs. The great Genoese families of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries — shipowners, bankers, industrialists, politicians — competed for over a century in commissioning chapels and statues from the most renowned sculptors and architects of the day, in styles that reflected the cosmopolitan taste of the European middle class:
- Neoclassical: the dominant style of the earliest tombs (1850-1870), in line with the Barabino-Resasco project. Doric columns, triangular pediments, marble statues in classical draperies.
- Eclectic: from the early 1870s onwards, with multiple historical quotations (Gothic, Byzantine, Neo-Egyptian, Neo-Mesopotamian, Neo-Medieval).
- Bourgeois realism: from the 1880s a more realistic, narrative sculpture, with the deceased shown in their contemporary clothes, in everyday scenes or scenes of family affection. It is the style that characterises some of the cemetery’s most famous sculptures (Giulio Monteverde is the master of this strand).
- Liberty / Art Nouveau: from the end of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth (1890-1915), fluid forms, allegorical female subjects, hermetic symbolisms. The signature sculptor of this period at Staglieno is Leonardo Bistolfi.
- Deco and Rationalism: between the two wars, more restrained tombs with modernist references.
The classic visitor route runs along the great Neoclassical porticoes — the Lower Porticato di Levante, the Upper Porticato di Ponente, the Semicircular Porticato — which are themselves a walk through an encyclopaedia of nineteenth-century Italian sculpture.
The masterpieces of sculpture
Among the most important sculptures, unmissable on any visit:
“Statue of Faith” by Giulio Monteverde, Oneto tomb (1882) — one of the most reproduced sculptures of the cemetery, a masterpiece of bourgeois realism. Faith, gently bowed over the cross with an expression of deep sadness, is depicted as a young bourgeois woman of the period — not as a saint or an abstract allegory. Giulio Monteverde (Bistagno 1837 — Rome 1917) was one of the most important Italian sculptors of the day, trained in Rome and active in Turin. The statue, set in front of the Oneto family tomb, is considered one of the manifestos of nineteenth-century European sculptural realism.
“The Hazelnut Seller” by Lorenzo Orengo, Campodonico tomb (1881) — one of the most moving stories in the cemetery. Caterina Campodonico was a street seller of hazelnuts and strings of hazelnuts at the Sanctuary of Our Lady of the Guard. Saving every penny during her life, she managed to commission her own funerary statue while still alive, and to pay for it in full. The sculptor Lorenzo Orengo portrays her standing, in the popular dress of the period, with her hazelnut strings in her hands and a proud expression. It is the portrayal of a woman of the people made with the same care as was lavished on patricians — a claim of popular dignity unique in nineteenth-century European funerary sculpture.
Tomb of Erminia Cambiaso by Gian Battista Villa (1880) — one of the best-known examples of lugubrious realism, with the woman portrayed in her death agony.
Statues by Leonardo Bistolfi: the Casale-born sculptor (Casale Monferrato 1859 — La Loggia 1933) is one of the leading figures of Italian Liberty. At Staglieno he produced several tombs, including the famous “Sphinx” of the Bauer tomb and the “Angel of the Resurrection”.
Sculptures by Augusto Rivalta, Eugenio Baroni, Edoardo Alfieri, Vittorio Lavezzari, Demetrio Paernio and hundreds of other Italian and European sculptors active in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The illustrious burials
The cemetery is also a historical memory of the city and of the Italian Risorgimento. Among the illustrious dead:
Giuseppe Mazzini (Genoa 22 June 1805 — Pisa 10 March 1872) — the father of the Italian Risorgimento and one of the most influential political thinkers of nineteenth-century Europe. His mausoleum, designed by the architect Pasquale Castagnola in 1877, is in a severe Neoclassical style, with two great Doric columns framing the entrance and a plain inscription: “GIUSEPPE MAZZINI”. No panegyric, no allegory: the republican and democratic sobriety that Mazzini himself had embodied in life. The mausoleum stands in the area of the cemetery known as the “Secular Pantheon”, where several great figures of the Risorgimento and of liberal Italy are buried.
Constance Lloyd Wilde (Dublin 1858 — Genoa 1898) — the wife of Oscar Wilde. Constance died in Genoa during a trip in 1898 from complications following a spinal operation. Her grave, simple but dignified, is a constant destination for readers and admirers of Wilde. The original gravestone bore the inscription “Constance Mary, daughter of Horace Lloyd, Q.C.” — only in 1963, decades later, was a cross added with the words “Wife of Oscar Wilde”.
Fabrizio De André (Genoa 1940 — Milan 1999) — the Genoese singer-songwriter, one of the most beloved voices of twentieth-century Italian song. The tomb of the Pratzer-De André family stands in the Bisagno sector of the cemetery, in a tucked-away position. It is one of the most visited graves, with visitors leaving flowers, notes and symbolic objects all year round (empty bowls, cigarettes, books).
Others buried here: Edoardo Sanguineti (poet and literary critic), Ferruccio Parri (anti-Fascist politician, Prime Minister of Italy in 1945), Govi (Gilberto Govi, Genoese comic actor), numerous Partisans of the Resistance in the Soldiers’ Field and in the Fallen Enclosure. Luigi Tenco (the singer-songwriter) is sometimes mistakenly reported as being buried here but is buried in the cemetery of Ricaldone Monferrato.
The Pantheon and the great monumental spaces
The Pantheon of Staglieno — built in the mid-nineteenth century at the centre of the cemetery, on the axis of Piazzale Resasco — is the most imposing civic building in the complex: a great circular-plan hall with a dome, inspired by the Pantheon in Rome. Originally intended as a cemetery church, today it also hosts commemorative events and civic ceremonies (particularly in the period of the commemoration of the Resistance fallen, in April).
The Semicircular Porticato closes the Pantheon square with a great hemicycle of Neoclassical Doric columns; beneath it stand some of the most important tombs of Genoese aristocratic families of the second half of the nineteenth century. It is a space of great atmosphere, especially in the early morning hours with the raking light.
Practical visiting and recommended route
For a 2-3 hour visit (the minimum to enjoy the cemetery meaningfully), the recommended route is:
- Entrance from Piazzale Resasco, collect the map at the Visitor Office.
- Lower Porticato di Levante: first walk among the Neoclassical and realist tombs; here are many of the most important sculptures (Monteverde’s Statue of Faith, Orengo’s Hazelnut Seller).
- Climb to the Mazzini Mausoleum and the Secular Pantheon.
- Visit to the central Pantheon and the Semicircular Porticato.
- Descent to the Upper Porticato di Ponente, the Liberty section (Bistolfi, Baroni).
- English Cemetery and Non-Catholic Section (Constance Lloyd Wilde’s grave).
- Bisagno Sector for De André’s grave.
- An optional extension to the Boschetti above, a wooded area with more recent burials and a view over the city.
The cemetery is more frequented in the morning than the afternoon (when the shade of the porticoes makes photography and reading inscriptions difficult). The best light for photos is from 9:00 to 11:30.
Illustrious visitors and cultural impact
Staglieno has been a destination for generations of European intellectuals and artists. Mark Twain visited a Genoese cemetery during his 1867 Mediterranean voyage recounted in The Innocents Abroad (1869) — the chapter on Genoa describes a vast colonnaded marble cemetery widely identified with Staglieno, although Twain does not name it.
Friedrich Nietzsche stayed in Genoa several times in the 1880s (for reasons of health) and regularly visited the cemetery. Among twentieth-century writers it has been mentioned by Thomas Hardy, Edward Bulwer-Lytton and Marguerite Yourcenar.
In the twentieth century the cemetery has been studied as an essential chapter of European sculpture between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by art historians such as Federico Zeri, Eugenio Battisti and Annamaria Petrioli Tofani. The sculptures of Monteverde, Bistolfi and Orengo have been exhibited at international shows in Paris, London and New York. The cemetery itself has repeatedly been declared a “place of the heart” by the FAI (the Italian National Trust).
Practical information
Hours: open daily from 7:30 to 17:00 (7:30-16:00 in winter, 7:30-18:00 in summer). Open also on all religious and civic holidays.
Tickets: free admission. The guided tours organised by the City (by booking) cost around €8-10 per person.
Contacts: telephone +39 010 5575175 (Municipal Cemeteries Office), official site staglieno.comune.genova.it. Free printed map at the entrance, with themed routes and the locations of the most important tombs.
Rules of respect: Staglieno is an active cemetery, where funerals are held every day. Visitors are asked to behave soberly: speak quietly, no picnics, avoid noisy behaviour near ongoing funerals. Photography is allowed, but it is forbidden to photograph funeral ceremonies.
What’s nearby
Staglieno lies in the Bisagno Valley, a first-ring eastern district of the city. There are no other tourist attractions in the immediate vicinity. To build a day, the visit to the cemetery can be combined with the return to the old town (15-25 minutes by bus), where all the other sights are concentrated. Most visitors devote a half-day to the cemetery (morning) and the other half to the centre (afternoon).
For lunch before or after the visit, there are no notable restaurants near the cemetery. Better to head back to the centre: Sa Pesta, Zeffirino, I Tre Merli at the Porto Antico, or the old-town trattorie (Trattoria da Maria, Trattoria da Genio).
Other city attractions reachable from Staglieno: Cathedral of San Lorenzo, Doge’s Palace, Musei di Strada Nuova, Palazzo Spinola, Aquarium, Galata Museum of the Sea, Lanterna — all reachable in 20-30 minutes from the cemetery by bus plus a few minutes on foot.
