On a hillside in the Staglieno district, the Monumental Cemetery of Staglieno is both a working cemetery and one of Genoa’s most important open-air collections of sculpture. The City of Genoa describes it as an outdoor museum, a useful phrase as long as it does not obscure the site’s primary purpose: people continue to come here to mourn and visit family graves. Its porticoes, terraces, monuments and planted slopes form a place of remembrance rather than a conventional museum gallery, so a visit calls for both curiosity and respect.
The planning story begins in 1835, when the city commissioned architect Carlo Barabino to design a new cemetery beyond the crowded historic core. Barabino died during the cholera epidemic that year, and his pupil and collaborator Giovanni Battista Resasco continued the project. The city approved Resasco’s plan in 1840, work began in 1844, and the cemetery officially opened to the public on January 1, 1851, while construction was still incomplete. The chronology explains why the place feels like an evolving civic landscape rather than a finished monument from a single moment.
