Staglieno Cemetery
On Gingerguide's self-guided Genoa audio tour, Staglieno Cemetery is a stop worth about ~150 min. Stand in front of it, press play for a short narrated story, and put any follow-up question to the built-in AI guide.
- Type monument
- Suggested visit ~150 min
- Genoa Genoa guide
About Staglieno Cemetery
One of the most extraordinary cemeteries in the world, a vast hillside necropolis with monumental sculptures of breathtaking quality, visited by Mark Twain, and the burial place of Oscar Wilde's wife, Constance.
The Staglieno Cemetery, opened in 1851 in a valley in the hills north of Genoa, is one of the most remarkable and least known of Europe's great nineteenth-century cemeteries, a vast, hillside necropolis of avenues, colonnades, and monumental chapels covering 160 hectares, containing over 300,000 graves, and housing a collection of nineteenth and early twentieth-century funerary sculpture that is, in aggregate, perhaps the finest in the world. The cemetery was established during the great era of bourgeois wealth and civic pride, when wealthy Genoese merchants and industrialists competed to erect the most impressive funerary monuments for their families. The sculptors they employed were among the finest working in Italy, and the quality and ambition of the work, life-size and larger-than-life figures in marble and bronze, elaborate narrative reliefs, Symbolist allegories of death and resurrection, is breathtaking. Mark Twain visited and wrote about it in his 1869 book The Innocents Abroad, calling it the most remarkable cemetery he had seen. Among those buried here is Constance Wilde, the wife of Oscar Wilde, who died in Genoa in 1898.
Did you know? Mark Twain devoted several pages to Staglieno in The Innocents Abroad (1869): "When I saw the great cemetery of Genoa, I saw that the Italians are the greatest of all peoples for making beautiful things to put over dead people." His account brought generations of English-speaking travellers to the cemetery.
How much time do you need at Staglieno Cemetery?
Around ~150 min works well for Staglieno Cemetery — time to look properly and listen to its story on the spot. Linger if you like; nothing on a self-guided walk is on a clock.
Should you stop at Staglieno Cemetery?
Yes — Staglieno Cemetery made the cut as one of 18 places the Gingerguide team researched and narrated across Genoa. The story tells you why it is worth the stop, and the AI guide fills in anything you still wonder.
Nearby stops in Genoa
Hear the story of Staglieno Cemetery
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