Monumental Cemetery of Turin
The Monumental Cemetery of Turin is the city's main historic cemetery, located in the Regio Parco area, with its entrance on piazzale Carlo Tancredi Falletti di Barolo, along corso Novara. Founded in 1828 as a "general cemetery," it later took the name Monumentale because of its numerous tombs of historic and artistic value; it includes the crematory Temple and the Place of Remembrance for the scattering of ashes.[1][5][6]
The founding
In 1827 the City approved the project for a general cemetery by the architect Gaetano Lombardi, located away from the built-up area and close to the Dora: a belated application of Napoleon's 1804 decrees on burials, which made it possible to close the cemeteries of San Pietro in Vincoli, in the Dora district, and of the Rocca, near the Po.[1] According to MuseoTorino, the cemetery became operational in 1828, the first step in a municipal public-health policy.[1] The marquis Tancredi Falletti di Barolo, who financed its construction almost entirely at his own expense, is buried there.[3][4]
The layout has a square plan with rounded corners, with the chapel and service buildings in Neoclassical style.[1][2] Lombardi drew up the plans and designs between 1826 and 1829; in 1840 the architect Carlo Sada signed the first expansion plan, and later also designed the Protestant cemetery (1844) and the Catholic one (1845).[1] In 1882 the crematory temple was built there, one of the first in Italy.[1][2]
The war and the Campo della Gloria
On the night of 13 July 1943 an RAF bombing raid struck the church, the cremation altar and a stretch of the portico on corso Regio Parco, destroying or damaging monuments and shrines.[1] In the Campo della Gloria, dedicated to partisans and political deportees, 48 marble cubes by Beppe Maggiore and Enrico Cellino hold the remains of 1,226 dead, some of whom remain unnamed.[1] The cemetery has areas reserved for the Jewish community, the Waldensian Church, religious orders and military bodies.[6]
The tombs
The Monumentale is described as an open-air museum.[7] Among those who worked there were Leonardo Bistolfi, Pietro Canonica, Vincenzo Vela, Odoardo Tabacchi, Edoardo Rubino and Carlo Ceppi, authors of monuments such as the Hess family tomb (Bistolfi, 1923-1926), the Ferreri Provana tomb (Vela, 1867) and the Braida-Fontanella tomb (Bistolfi, 1881-1883).[10] In the nineteenth-century arcades and large niches of the so-called Primitivo are buried Silvio Pellico, Iolanda Margherita di Savoia and Rosa Vercellana, the "bela Rosin."[9]
Among those buried there are also Massimo d'Azeglio, Vincenzo Gioberti, Edmondo De Amicis, Carolina Invernizio, Primo Levi, Mario Soldati, Cesare Lombroso, Galileo Ferraris, Rita Levi-Montalcini, Vittorio Valletta, Battista, Andrea and Sergio Pininfarina, Fred Buscaglione, Erminio Macario and the players of the Grande Torino; also resting there are the 64 victims of the Statuto cinema and the seven victims of the ThyssenKrupp fire.[8] In 2022 an AFC researcher identified the burial place of the painter Pelagio Palagi in the Solei family tomb.[11]
Today
The cemetery is managed by AFC Torino, which organizes visits with accredited guides according to a set schedule, provides historical-artistic guides and an app for visitors, and issues, on request, permits to photograph the historic tombs.[7] The perimeter wall is 3,300 metres long overall; in January 2023 the restoration of the wall and the arcades of the Primitivo was announced, at a cost of about 3.5 million euros, and the Monumentale is part of the network of European historic cemeteries.[9]
Related articles: Pelagio Palagi
Pages linking here
Sources
- MuseoTorino
- TorinoToday — 4 November 2016
- MuseoTorino
- Treccani, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani —
- Città di Torino — 22 December 2025
- AFC Torino
- AFC Torino
- Turismo Torino e Provincia
- TorinoToday — 16 January 2023
- MuseoTorino
- ANSA — 25 May 2022