At Staglieno there is a statue of a woman who sold hazelnuts in the street. It is life-size, carved in marble, with a shawl over her shoulders, gold earrings, and in her hands the hazelnut necklaces and the ring-shaped biscuits she sold to pilgrims outside the sanctuaries. Her name was Caterina Campodonico, she died in 1882, and she paid for that monument while she was still alive, setting money aside for years.
It is not a marginal anecdote: it is the key to the whole cemetery. Staglieno is the place where a new social class bought, with funerary sculpture, the recognition nobody else was willing to give it.
Admission is free, every day, and you need two hours. It is probably the most important museum of nineteenth-century sculpture in Europe, and it has neither a ticket office nor a bookshop.
Why it exists, and why it is so big
Why does a cemetery on this scale come into being in 1851? The starting point is a Napoleonic law. The Edict of Saint-Cloud of 1804 banned burials inside cities and inside churches, and obliged municipalities to build graveyards outside the walls. Genoa entrusted the project to Carlo Barabino in 1835; Barabino died of cholera that same year, during the epidemic, and the work passed to Giovanni Battista Resasco, who completed it and opened it on 2 January 1851.
The complex today occupies three hundred and thirty thousand square metres on the flank of the Val Bisagno, and it is laid out on stacked levels: arcaded galleries at the bottom, the large irregular wood above them, and at the top a circular building that imitates the Pantheon in Rome, reached by a monumental staircase. Halfway up the staircase stands the statue of Faith by Santo Varni, nine metres tall.
There are also separate enclosures for the non-Catholic communities: the Jewish one opens in 1886, the Greek Orthodox one in 1882, the Protestant one in 1902 and the Muslim one in 2000.
The class that bought itself eternity
What was a Genoese merchant looking for when he ordered a tomb with three life-size statues? In the second half of the nineteenth century Genoa was the leading port in Italy, and maritime trade had created a very rich middle class with no titles. The old patrician families kept it out of their palaces and out of their marriages; public office remained the preserve of the old names.
The tomb became the field in which that class could compete without asking anyone’s permission. The best sculptors of the day were commissioned to make monuments in which the family appeared portrayed from life, in contemporary clothes, with the overcoat, the top hat and the watch chain, next to angels and allegorical figures.
This is what is new about Staglieno, and the reason art historians come here from all over the world. In almost no other European cemetery does funerary sculpture abandon the idealised repertoire so early and so completely for the realistic portrait of ordinary people.
The five things to look for
The monument to Caterina Campodonico, carved by Lorenzo Orengo in 1881, is the most famous piece and stands along the lower portico. The inscription, in Genoese and in verse, names her as the patron and explains that the statue was paid for with the savings from her work. Look at her hands: they hold her goods, not a prayer book.
The angel of the Oneto tomb, carved by Giulio Monteverde in 1882, is the sculpture that set the model for the whole of Europe. It is not a consoling angel: it is a young female figure, seated, with her wings lowered and her gaze straight ahead, in an attitude that looks more like waiting than comfort. Copies and imitations of it exist from Buenos Aires to Barcelona.
Giuseppe Mazzini’s tomb sits in a secluded corner, at the foot of a flight of steps, and it is the opposite of everything else here: a block of rough stone under a small Doric temple, with no statues and no rhetoric. Mazzini died in Pisa in 1872 and was buried here, in his own city.
The Pantheon, at the top of the staircase, with the statues of the prophets Job and Jeremiah at its sides.
The English enclosure, where Constance Lloyd is buried, the wife of Oscar Wilde, who died in Genoa in 1898. The original gravestone carried no mention of Wilde, and the reference to her husband was added only in 1963.
What you see as you walk, and how to walk it
Staglieno is not a place you visit by checklist. The right thing to do is to walk up along the lower portico, which is the densest part and where most of the important sculptures are, then climb to the wood and finally to the Pantheon staircase.
The irregular wood is the latest and the freest section: the tombs are not aligned, the ground rises among the cypresses, and there are Liberty and neo-Egyptian monuments in the middle of the vegetation. It is also the part where it is easiest to get lost, and that is no bad thing.
One thing to know before you go: the cemetery is in use. Funerals are held here and families come to visit their dead. Museum behaviour, with loud voices and photographs taken in people’s faces, is out of place.
Who came here before you
Staglieno was already a stop on educated European tourism in the nineteenth century, when monumental cemeteries were as recognised an attraction as picture galleries. Among those who passed through were Mark Twain, who wrote about it in his travel accounts, Friedrich Nietzsche, who lived in Genoa between 1880 and 1883, and Ernest Hemingway, who called it one of the wonders of the world.
If Paris is on your list too, the obvious comparison is Père-Lachaise, which is older and more famous but has a different vocation: there you go above all to look for the graves of famous people, here you go to look at the sculpture.
Practical information
Checked on 3 September 2026 on the website of the Comune di Genova. Hours and access change: check again before you travel.
Tickets. Admission is free. Paid guided tours are organised from time to time by the city council and by local associations.
Opening hours. The cemetery normally opens from 7.30 am to 5 pm. On 25 December and Easter Sunday it closes at 1 pm; it is closed on 1 and 6 January, Easter Monday, 24 June, 15 August and 26 December. Last admission is half an hour before closing.
Getting there. Buses 12, 13, 14 and 34 leave from the centre, and the journey takes about half an hour. By car you arrive from the Genova Est motorway exit, and there is a car park inside.
How long it takes. Two hours covers the lower portico, the staircase and the Pantheon. Three hours if you add the irregular wood without hurrying. Wear comfortable shoes: the gradients are steep and the staircases are long.
Where to go next
Staglieno closes the second day of the itinerary in What to see in Genoa in 2 days, which begins with the Rolli palaces and passes through Villa del Principe.
Photographs by Vassil, Superchilum, Twice25, Bellatrovata and Angelo G. Valle from Wikimedia Commons, licences CC0, CC BY-SA and CC BY.
