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The Marbled Whispers | Staglieno Cemetery, Italy · The Grim: Haunted Cemeteries & Graveyard Tales

0:13
Kristin: Grim morning and welcome to the Grim.
0:16
Kristin: I'm your host, Kristen.
0:18
Kristin: On today's episode, we'll be opening the gate and entering Stagleno Cemetery, located in Genoa, Italy.
0:25
Kristin: The aroma of coffee mingles in the air.
0:28
Kristin: The gates stand open.
0:29
Kristin: Step carefully.
0:31
Kristin: As I'm going to descend into the hauntings of history.
0:34
Kristin: There's a certain kind of feeling that comes with spring, the kind that lingers in the air just long enough to make you restless, to make you want to go somewhere.
0:43
Kristin: Plans then begin to take shape.
0:45
Kristin: Flights are booked, maps are unfolded.
0:48
Kristin: And for many, the compass points toward Italy, toward the familiar beauty of Rome, Florence, and Milan.
0:55
Kristin: But tucked along the Ligurian coasts, there's a city that asks a little less loudly to be seen, Genoa.
1:01
Kristin: And hidden within it is a place that simply doesn't invite you to visit, but to linger.
1:07
Kristin: More than a resting place, Stegleno is an open-air museum of grief and artistry, where the marble and stone of some of Italy's most remarkable sculptors whisper stories you've likely never seen or heard of.
1:19
Kristin: Nestled on the hillside in the district of Stagleno, the cemetery stretches over a square kilometer, making it one of the largest in Europe.
1:27
Kristin: Its monumental sculptures tell stories of ambition, sorrow, and devotion, and timeless echoes of lives once lived.
1:35
Kristin: Stagleno's story begins in the shadow of Napoleon's 1804 Addict of St.
1:40
Kristin: Cloud, which forbade burials within churches and towns, forcing the living to find new ways to honor the dead.
1:47
Kristin: In 1835, Genoa's architect Carlo Berabino conceived a grand design for a cemetery that would rise above the city, a sanctuary of stone and memory.
1:57
Kristin: Fate, however, had other plans.
2:00
Kristin: Berabino succumbed to the cholera epidemic that swept the city that same year, and the vision of Stagleno passed to his assistant, Giovanno Battista Reasco, who would bring it to life.
2:12
Kristin: The grounds of the Villa Baccaretta were chosen for Stagleno, a site both removed from the bustle of Genoa and yet close enough to remain part of its heart.
2:21
Kristin: Construction began in 1844, and on a cold January day in 1851, the cemetery opened its gates.
2:28
Kristin: Only four burials marked the first day, but soon the hillside would swell with the lives, ambitions, and legacies of the city.
2:36
Kristin: As Degleno grew, it became a mosaic of faiths and histories.
2:40
Kristin: English, Protestant, and Jewish sections were added, along with Orthodox, Muslim, and with military and civilian English burial grounds, creating a tapestry of stories that stretched across centuries.
2:52
Kristin: At its center rises the towering statue of fate, sculpted by Santo Varney, watching silently over the hillside.
3:00
Kristin: A grand staircase climbs from its base to a domed panthenon, modeled after Rome's, flanked by marble prophets Jeremiah and Ja, eternal sentinels in quiet reflection.
3:11
Kristin: These galleries, arcades, and the panthenon itself were the first to be completed, carrying some of the oldest and most revered works of Stegleno.
3:19
Kristin: When the original galleries were filled, the cemetery expanded again.
3:23
Kristin: The Montino and Esantonio galleries rose, home to more modern sculptures in Art Nouveau and Deco styles.
3:30
Kristin: Higher up, Voscato sculpture garden winds through the wooden hills and paths lined with tombs, mausoleums, and memorials, offering secluded corners where grief and art converge.
3:41
Kristin: Though Steglino is primarily Catholic, its walls shelter all of Genoa's community.
3:46
Kristin: Yet some of the sections bear the weight of time and neglect more heavily than others.
3:51
Kristin: The Jewish cemeteries, for instance, tell a quieter, tragic story.
3:55
Kristin: The small Jewish community of Genoa was devastated during the Holocaust, and few remained to tend to their ancestors' graves.
4:03
Kristin: It's in this tension between grandeur and abandonment, memory and silence, that has long unsettled those who walk its paths.
4:10
Kristin: A century after its creation, Evelyn War tried to give voice to that unease, capturing not just the beauty of Stigleno, but its strained overwhelming permanence.
4:20
Kristin: It is a museum of the mid-19th century Burrois art in the full, true sense that the Campo of Genoa stands supreme.
4:27
Kristin: If Pierre Lachey or the Abert Memorial were obliterated, the loss would be negligible as long as this great repository survives.
4:35
Kristin: His words didn't diminish other monuments so much as the elevated Stegleno into something rarer, a place where art refuses to fade, even as the lives it memorializes have long since vanished.
4:47
Kristin: Genoa, once a city shaped by learning and culture, drew reformists and the rising bourgeois, those eager to leave something of themselves behind, not just in memory but in stone.
4:58
Kristin: Within these grounds, a quiet tradition took hold.
5:01
Kristin: Fignory sculpture began to flourish, exquisitely lifelike and at times unsettling in roots realism.
5:07
Kristin: Draped marble clings like fabric.
5:10
Kristin: Expressions linger somewhere between breath and stillness.
5:13
Kristin: Here, life and death don't stand apart, they meet in marble, intertwined with its stillness.
5:19
Kristin: And as you wander, there's this strange lingering feeling, as though the sculptures are not merely tributes, but the residents themselves, caught in a single unending moment of time.
5:30
Kristin: Even the grades of literature and philosophy couldn't resist its pull.
5:33
Kristin: Mark Twain, in his 1869 Innocence Abroad, paused and aw to observe the cemetery's grandeur.
5:39
Kristin: On either side, as one walks down the middle of the passage, are monuments, tombs, and the sculpted figures that are exquisitely wrought and are full of grace and beauty.
5:49
Kristin: They are new and snowy.
5:51
Kristin: Every outline is perfect, every feature guiltless of mutation, flaw, or blemish.
5:57
Kristin: And therefore, to us, these far-reaching ranks of bewitching forms are a hundredfold more lovely than the damaged and dingy statuary that they have saved from the wreck of ancient art and set up in the galleries of Paris for the worship of the world.
6:11
Kristin: In the 1880s, Frederick Nietzsche wandered these shadow colonnades with his friend Paul Ray, engaging in long meandering debates on philosophy, morality, and the human condition.
6:22
Kristin: Among the tombs and statues, the weight of history and the permanence of stone seemed to mirror the weight of their thoughts, offering a space where ideas and morality intertwined.
6:32
Kristin: In 1978, photographer Bernard Pierre Woof wandered Stegleno, drawn to its stillness, its weight and the quiet, unspoken grief held in marble and ivy.
6:42
Kristin: Through his lens, he captured the cemetery's melancholy, carrying it beyond the stones and beyond the city itself.
6:48
Kristin: That solemn, aching beauty would find an unexpected life.
6:52
Kristin: On the cover of Joy Division's closer, reaching millions of fans who would never walk these paths, yet felt the haunting presence of the figures here.
7:00
Kristin: Since then, fans of the band had made the pilgrimage, seeking the very corners of the cemetery that inspired those images.
7:07
Kristin: On the cover, a sculpted mourning scene.
7:09
Kristin: The Apiani family tomb seems almost suspended in time.
7:13
Kristin: Its figures locked in eternal vigil.
7:16
Kristin: Elsewhere, a solitary angel, headbound in quiet sorrow, would later accompany level Terrace apart, its silent grief echoing across the music.
7:25
Kristin: In 2003, another lens entered the cemetery.
7:28
Kristin: Photographer Lee Freilander captured the ematic beauty of the grounds, producing a book of photographs that captured its solemn artistry.
7:37
Kristin: A limited edition of his work, released by Columbia University's Leroy Neiman Center for Print Studies, was bound in a red coffin velvet, a homage to the grave, and a reminder of the cemetery's enduring power to move and unsettle.
7:51
Kristin: Eamon fiction has flirted with Stigleno's shadows.
7:54
Kristin: Early scripts for Honor Majesty's Secret Service plan a chilling opening here.
7:59
Kristin: James Bond visiting the Blofeld Crypt, checking that the villain's death was real.
8:04
Kristin: However, it was never used.
8:06
Kristin: But for all the artistry and beauty, the main question remains of whom is within?
8:11
Kristin: While hundreds of souls find rest here, a few residents left their mark on history, some in bloodshed for the unification of Italy.
8:20
Kristin: Nino Bixio commands the hillside even in death.
8:23
Kristin: A Genoese boy sent to the sea as a child who came home restless and found his purpose in revolution.
8:30
Kristin: He fought in the streets of 1848, captured an entire French battalion under Garbaldi in Rome, and helped organize the famous expedition of the thousand into Sicily.
8:40
Kristin: At the Battle of Calatafimi, with Gibaldi at his side, legend says the order was simple: make Italy or die here.
8:48
Kristin: Bixio survived that hill, Embertuno, where his leg was broken, and the long road to Rome.
8:55
Kristin: He was here in September of 1870 when the city finally fell and the unification of Italy was complete.
9:01
Kristin: Then, with the nation built and no more wars left to fight, he returned to Commerce and sailed for the Dutch East Indies.
9:08
Kristin: He died of cholera in Sumatra in December of 1873 in order to take command of a trading expedition.
9:15
Kristin: He had survived every battlefield, but it was cholera that took him in the end.
9:20
Kristin: Nearby the spirit of music lingers with Fabrizio DeAndre.
9:24
Kristin: He sank for the outcast and the forgotten, his voice-carrying stories most would rather ignore.
9:30
Kristin: Even now, it feels as though his songs have not entirely left this place, as if they've settled into the air itself, waiting patiently for someone to listen.
9:41
Kristin: In a gentler's shadow rests Constance Lloyd, forever tied to Oscar Wilde.
9:46
Kristin: Hers is not a story of spectacle, but of endurance, of love complicated by brilliance, and the quiet strength it takes to remain when the world is watching.
9:56
Kristin: Nearby a complicated resident found peace in a city that originally cast him out.
10:01
Kristin: Giuseppe Mazzini watches over the grounds with the patience of a man who waited his entire life and never quite got what he wanted.
10:09
Kristin: Sentenced to death in absentia, he wandered from Switzerland to Paris to London, writing and plotting from exile for decades, building young Italy into a movement with tens of thousands of followers.
10:22
Kristin: He died of pleurisy in Pisa in 1872, just one year after Rome finally fell and the unification was complete.
10:31
Kristin: He had dreamed of a republic, what emerged was a monarchy.
10:35
Kristin: At the time of his death, he considered himself to have failed.
10:39
Kristin: His funeral drew thousands of people to the streets of Genoa, and the city that once condemned him welcomed him in death.
10:46
Kristin: And here he rests, surrounded by the nation he helped imagine into existence.
10:51
Kristin: Thirsting Leno, the soft echo of melody, drifts through the colonnades, it's Michelle Navarro's notes forming Italy's national anthem.
10:59
Kristin: Written in 1847, once it aroused crowds to action, Hera feels more intimate along with a composer, as if remembered rather than proclaimed, a quiet thread connecting past and present, a song folded into marble and ivory.
11:15
Kristin: A few steps along other presences linger, quieter but no less insistent.
11:20
Kristin: Anna Maria Ortiz, whose writing turned toward those often unseen, seems to understand this place instinctively.
11:27
Kristin: Her words were fragile, searching, never entirely solid.
11:32
Kristin: And here among the stones and shadows, it's easy to imagine her walking these paths, sensing memory hovering just out of reach.
11:39
Kristin: Not far while Fernanda Pivano left her mark in a quieter, enduring way.
11:44
Kristin: Born in Genoa and educated in Turin, she was introduced to American literature by the poet Caesar Pavese, a teacher who sparked a lifelong fascination.
11:54
Kristin: In 1943, she published her first translation, Spoon River Anthology, and went on to bring the voices of Hemingway, Ginsburg, Carowac, Fitzgerald, and many others to Italian readers.
12:06
Kristin: She collaborated closely with the authors themselves, translating with care and sometimes even helping secure uncensored publication.
12:14
Kristin: Her work was more than translation.
12:16
Kristin: It was connection, a quiet, generous act of letting distant lives and ideas speak across oceans and language, and leaving a legacy that is still remembered today, honored even with a literary prize bearing her name.
12:29
Kristin: A little further along, Rest Lea Lestrange Malone, with quiet dignity, far from the London she once called home.
12:36
Kristin: She arrived in Italy on holiday in 1951, drawn by the sun, warmth, and beauty, and she stayed, leaving behind a life defined by steady and glamorous labor.
12:46
Kristin: She co-founded the Workers' Birth Control Group in 1924, pushed the Labour Party to adopt birth control policy, and served on the London County Council for 15 years.
12:57
Kristin: She worked to make ordinary lives a little less hard.
13:00
Kristin: Perhaps it's fitting that she rests here, among the stones that remember so much.
13:05
Kristin: In another corner Ferruccio Perry moves through these grounds as if still watching over Italy.
13:11
Kristin: During the occupation, he fought in the shadows under the alias Maurizio, organizing resistance quietly and risking everything.
13:19
Kristin: In January of 1945, he was captured by the Waffen assassin in Milan and imprisoned for two months, and then released through secret negotiations.
13:28
Kristin: When the war ended, he became Italy's first post-war prime minister.
13:32
Kristin: He lasted only five months, though, but left a warning: beware of civil war, beware of the return of fascism.
13:40
Kristin: He called himself simply an uomo della strada, a man of the street.
13:45
Kristin: And here amongst soldiers, revolutionaries, and dreamers, he remains that man, asking for nothing and giving everything.
13:52
Kristin: There are some souls who find eternal rest within these grounds, but the next resident perhaps never will.
13:58
Kristin: And Werto Sangonetti is one of them, born in Genoa, buried in Genoa, and restless every moment in between.
14:06
Kristin: Poet, playwright, literary professor, communist lawmaker, provocateur.
14:11
Kristin: He believed the language could be dismantled and rebuilt, made truer each time.
14:16
Kristin: His first collection, Labyrinthus, arrived in 1956, forever changing the shape of poetry.
14:22
Kristin: Comprised of fragments, borrowed words, and shifting tones, dry and low, political and poetic, it moved through a restless current, tumbling over itself, refusing to behave.
14:33
Kristin: He would go on to help found Grappo 63, reshaping Italy's avant-garde along with figures like Umberto Echo, never allowing literature to settle into comfort.
14:42
Kristin: He was also an active translator, bringing the works of Joyce, Molire, Shakespeare, Bernal de Brecht, and even Greek and Latin authors into new life through translation.
14:52
Kristin: He called himself the last Marxist, carrying that belief not only into politics but into the very structure of his work, and he said of poetry, it is not dead, but it lives a secret life.
15:05
Kristin: Standing here among the silent marble figures, that feels less like a metaphor and more like a promise.
15:11
Kristin: Sanguinetti always had the last word, and perhaps he still does.
15:16
Kristin: The cemetery is also a gallery of sculptural mastery, artists like Leonardo Bistolfi, the Italian symbolist whose erethral figures seem almost fragile enough to dissolve.
15:32
Kristin: Julio Monteverde, a master of monumental works that feels startingly alive, Eugenio Baroni, who gave ordinary gestures a sacred weight, Eduardo Alfareri, whose compositions tell stories in posture, and Victoro La Fazeri, whose delicate drapery and expressive hands evoke quiet melancholy.
15:53
Kristin: They poured grief, devotion, and artistry into stone.
15:56
Kristin: Angels weep mid-motion, prophets contemplate eternity, and every statue speaks of human fragility and the silent weight of memory.
16:05
Kristin: It's astonishing that so many never find their way into the grounds to admire these breathtaking works of mastery.
16:11
Kristin: At every turn and terrace, visitors are drawn deeper into the art, each piece more breathtaking than the last.
16:18
Kristin: Yet Steglano's story is not only Italian nor confined to marble alone.
16:23
Kristin: On the outskirts, a distinctively British presence rises quietly on the hillside.
16:28
Kristin: The separate British cemetery, a solemn echo of foreign lives intertwined with Genoa's history.
16:34
Kristin: Here rest 230 servicemen from the First World War, a time when three British military hospitals operated within the city, tending to the wounded and dying far from home.
16:45
Kristin: These graves, marked by orderly rows of crosses and understated memorials, tell a story of sacrifice and exile, a reminder that war reaches beyond borders, touching even the sunlit hills of an Italian port city.
16:58
Kristin: From the Second World War lie 122 servicemen, their resting place designed with careful dignity by the architect Louis de Soissons.
17:07
Kristin: Many were garrison burials, stationed far from England yet bound by duty, while others were re-interred from scattered cemeteries.
17:14
Kristin: Brought together here in a quiet, mournful assembly.
17:17
Kristin: The plot itself seems to breathe with a memory of service, of young lives uprooted and transformed by global conflict.
17:24
Kristin: Walking among the British graves, one feels the stark contrast to the elaborate artistry of Stagleno's Italian sections.
17:32
Kristin: Here simplicity reigns, orderly headstones, modest inscriptions, the weight of history carried in restraint rather than marble grandeur.
17:41
Kristin: And yet, despite the quiet uniformity, the presence of these men is deeply felt.
17:46
Kristin: In the cool shadow of the cypresses, in the hush of the hillside breeze, one can almost hear the echoes of the marching boots, the distant rumble of battle, and the whispered conversations of the soldiers far from home.
17:59
Kristin: Genoa Forgot's Italian heart has always been a crossroads of the world.
18:03
Kristin: The British Cemetery stands as a testament to that truth.
18:07
Kristin: A fragment of foreign soil, a patch of remembrance where grief, loyalty, and the cost of war are etched into stone.
18:14
Kristin: It reminds visitors that history doesn't belong to one nation alone.
18:18
Kristin: It flows through cities, mingling lives and losses, until even a distant cemetery becomes a shrine to courage, memory, and the inescapable reach of human conflict.
18:29
Kristin: At Segleno, the dead never seem fully at rest but within the stone.
18:33
Kristin: The statues, carved in contemporary clothing, faces frozen in sorrow or contemplation, hover in the nickname The Talking Statues.
18:41
Kristin: It's a folk designation, not a ghost story, yet it captures something essential, the way these figures reach into the minds of the living, as if memory itself has taken form.
18:52
Kristin: Some sculptures have lain under dust for centuries, yet there's a particular sensation among visitors, an almost synonymous perception that the figures are poised on the edge of motion.
19:04
Kristin: Angels and mourners seem to breathe lightly, to shift or to watch.
19:08
Kristin: Even Peter Saville, the designer behind Joy Division's closer, admitted he could hardly believe the Appiani tomb photograph was real.
19:17
Kristin: He set that up.
19:18
Kristin: That's just models covered in dust, he said.
19:21
Kristin: He didn't realize it was actually marble.
19:23
Kristin: Then there are the stories that brush against legend.
19:26
Kristin: Katrina D'Apaconico, it is said, took delight in standing beside her own monument in the months before her death.
19:32
Kristin: Dressed in peasant clothes masking the princely likeness that awaited her in stone, she watched the reaction of visitors, living among the figures who would one day stand for her entirely, a woman haunting her own tomb, alive.
19:45
Kristin: It's a strange, eerie notion, yet it seamlessly fits into the strange pulse of Stegleno itself.
19:51
Kristin: In truth, the cemetery doesn't need conventional ghost stories.
19:54
Kristin: Stegleno is the ghost.
19:56
Kristin: The marble figures have absorbed grief, devotion, and memory so completely that they stand in for the dead themselves.
20:03
Kristin: There's no need wandering for spirits here.
20:06
Kristin: The entire place vibrates with the collective presence of those who have come before, and anyone who walks shadow corridors cannot help but feel it.
20:15
Kristin: For now, though, the stories of Stagleno slip back into stone, and the dead return to their uneasy rest.
20:21
Kristin: Thank you for walking with us through the veil into Steglano Cemetery, descending once more into the hauntings of history.
20:28
Kristin: The gate is sealed, the veil drawn, yet death keeps no calendar, and so we shall return, as we always do, on the grim.