Staglieno Cemetery

The Staglieno cemetery was officially opened to the public on January 1, 1851. Although at that time it was largely unfinished, its architectural, but functional and symbolic features had already been traced. Thanks to the impressive funerary monuments present in this cemetery, it is considered a true open-air museum. These numerous funerary statues and chapels were mainly composed of Genoese sculptors of various styles, and the entire complex becomes important in terms of architecture and funerary sculpture.

Project history

The design task of the Staglieno Cemetery was entrusted to the architect Carlo Barabino (1768-1835). In 1835, he was responsible for most of the neoclassical features of Genoa and the construction of representative buildings such as the Teatro Carlo Felice, the Accademia Palazzo dell and many others. However, he was unable to complete the project due to sudden death in 1835 during a great cholera epidemic. The task of developing the project for the Staglieno Cemetery was then entrusted to his student and co-author Giovanni Battista Resasco (1798-1871), whose plan was approved in 1840. Work began in 1844 in the area of Villa Vaccarezza in Staglieno, a sparsely populated area near the city center.

Architectural part

Resasco retained the quadrangular structure of the Staglieno Cemetery as the main core of the Barabino project, emphasizing its monumentality. A strong hint of this architectural structure is still visible and caused great admiration among contemporaries who, upon entering the main entrance, found themselves immersed in this vast scenography consisting of a series of monumental arcades. When the overall structure of the Staglieno Cemetery was completed between the sixties and eighties, the effect as a whole was enhanced by its inclusion in the natural surroundings. On the green hill in the area of Boschetti and Valletta Pontasso, which is lined with dense vegetation, there are chapels and monuments scattered and partially hidden in the greenery.

Expansion of Staglieno Cemetery

The growth of the city, which in those years became one of the main industrial and commercial centers of Northern Italy, soon required new expansions. A landscape integration that increased over time with some specifically naturalistic extensions, such as the non-Catholic area and the English cemetery, prepared in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth. In 1935-1936, a memorial to those who fell in the First World War was built.