One of the most remarkable cemeteries in the world, Staglieno covers 160 hectares in the hills north of Genoa and contains an extraordinary collection of funerary sculpture. The monuments here are not sombre stone slabs but elaborate marble tableaux: weeping women of uncanny realism, angels in mid-flight, children reaching upward, draped figures of extraordinary technical skill.
The craftsmen who produced these sculptures in the 19th and early 20th centuries were working in a tradition of Genoese marble-cutting that goes back centuries. The most famous individual piece is the Monteverde Angel, a kneeling figure so lifelike that photographs of it are regularly mistaken for a photograph of a real person. The cemetery is easy to reach by bus from the city centre and is open daily. Allow two hours; you will get lost, which is entirely the point.