Dead Gorgeous
“A dreaded summer day, so let’s go where we’re happy and I’ll meet you at the cemetery gates”
— The Smiths
A trip to the cemetery on holiday is something of a hard sell, I’ll admit. But whether it’s due to my angsty teenage years as a goth or my love of 19th century literature, I’ll confess to a penchant for a good graveyard. I’ve visited famous cemeteries around the world: Père Lachaise in Paris, Highgate in London, St. Louis Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans and Hollywood Forever in LA. I always find a trip to one of these ‘cities of the dead’ fascinating. They’re nice places to stroll, to bring a book, or to just sit and reflect, safe in the knowledge that the residents are not going to disturb you any time soon. It’s not that I particularly go to seek out the famous, fun as it may be to hang out with Rudolph Valentino, Marie Laveau, Oscar Wilde or Karl Marx. It’s because some are al fresco art museums, without the crowds of the Uffizi, the Accademia or the Vatican.
Two of my favourite cemeteries in the world are close to home in the north of Italy and pretty much under the radar. The first is Milan’s Cimitero Monumentale, or Monumental Cemetery, which has a surprisingly lively aesthetic for a place full of dead people. As befits Italy’s capital of cool, its the resting place of those who wrote the story of Italian art, architecture and design in the 20th century: Gio Ponti, Arturo Martini and Gae Aulenti, as well as fashion designer Franco Moschino, playwright and Nobel literature prize winner Dario Fo, prima ballerina Carla Fracci and the Campari family (of red drink fame).
The cemetery is a riot of 20th century art, obelisks, mausoleums, Greek temples and even a scaled-down version of Trajan’s column. It has everything, including Art Nouveau Symbolism, Realism and Eclecticism. The Campari family tomb is a life-sized bronze reproduction of the Last Supper. It’s a true open-air gallery, but without the ticket fees, gift shop, café or crowds. It really does make a spectacular place to visit on a sunny day and you can just stroll through and discover the wonderful sculptures at leisure or with guide who’ll bring it to life (pardon the pun).
The second is Staglieno Cemetery in Genoa. The gritty port city of Genoa, La Superba, one of Italy’s marine republics and once Queen of the Seas, is a place that people often overlook, on their way to join the Insta-swarms of the Cinque Terre, but it has much to recommend it. Not least the crumbling, sprawling but frankly spectacular Staglieno. Anyone who was a Joy Division fan will have already seen some of its wonderful funerary art. The cover of the band’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” 12” single and “Closer” album both feature Staglieno’s incredible tombs. It is strange that as one of Europe’s largest cemeteries and with sculpture to rival that of Père Lachaise, it is not better known. It has a very different aesthetic to the Milan cemetery, all delicate angels, lifelike statuary and a dusty, Victorian vibe. It is the resting place of people like Giuseppe Mazzini, one of the architects of Italy’s Risorgimento (Unification) – there’s a square named after him in virtually every Italian town – Fabrizio de Andre, perhaps Italy’s greatest singer-songwriter and Mrs. Oscar Wilde herself, Constance, killed off by a dodgy doctor while on the Italian Riviera (Oscar came to lay flowers on her grave before dying himself two years later).
But the famous residents aren’t really the point. After its opening in 1844, it became the resting place of Genoa’s affluent bourgeoisie determined not only to keep up with their neighbours, but to outdo them, in death as in life, with the beauty of their graves. And yet, amongst the great and the good, one of the cemetery’s most remembered residents is a woman named Caterina Campodonico, a hazelnut seller. Born poor and illiterate, she invested all the money she made from selling nuts and sweets to make herself immortal with one of the loveliest and most detailed statues in the whole place. She might not have had prestige, power and influence in this terrestrial realm, but she made damn sure she was going to get the respect she deserved in the next. Her epitaph (in Ligurian dialect) reads
In sun and storm I made my stand,
with nuts and sweet cakes in my hand,
By Acquasanta’s roadside fair,
by Garbo and San Ciprian there.
To have a crust when I grew old,
I pinched and saved each copper sold.
Then spent the rest, as fate had meant,
on this my grave and monument.
And lest the world forget the same,
Caterina Campodonico is my name.
A simple woman, plain and free.
If you pass by, pray here for me.
And I’ll leave the last word on this lovely place to Mark Twain, who visited Genoa and Staglieno in 1869 and said of it in his work “Innocents Abroad”:
“Our last sight was the cemetery, and we shall continue to remember it after we shall have forgotten the palaces”.
