Monumental Cemetery of Milan

Interesting facts

The ballet star Carla Fracci, who died in 2021, became the first woman to be entombed in the Famedio, the cemetery's hall of fame.

The tomb of the Campari family, of aperitif fame, displays a large sculpted version of the Last Supper.

The rationalist architects of the BBPR group designed a memorial to about 800 Milanese who were killed in Nazi concentration camps.

The pianist Vladimir Horowitz and the Nobel Prize-winning poet Salvatore Quasimodo are both buried here.

Football is represented too: Herbert Kilpin, founder of A.C. Milan, and the striker Giuseppe Meazza rest in the cemetery.

The Jewish section has its own entrance and about 1,778 burials, and in 2015 it gained artistic windows representing the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

The monumental Bernocchi family tomb was created in the 1930s by the sculptor Giannino Castiglioni.

Why it is worth it

Milan's Cimitero Monumentale is less a graveyard than an open-air museum of sculpture, a city of marble temples, obelisks, chapels and statuary in which the families of industrial and bourgeois Milan competed to commission the most striking memorial. It was designed by the architect Carlo Maciachini to replace a number of small cemeteries then scattered around the city, and it opened in the mid-1860s. Covering about 25 hectares, it was laid out as a non-denominational cemetery, with separate areas for non-Catholic and Jewish burials; the Jewish section opened in 1872 and was enlarged in 1913.

Visitors enter through the Famedio, a long, monumental entrance building in a Neo-Medieval idiom of striped marble and stone, conceived as a hall of fame for the city's most distinguished citizens. At its centre lies the novelist Alessandro Manzoni, author of The Betrothed, and memorials to many other notable Milanese surround him. Beyond the Famedio the grounds open into avenues lined with tombs in every style of the late 19th and 20th centuries: miniature Greek temples, Art Nouveau reliefs, Symbolist figures and stark modernist volumes, including a scaled-down copy of Trajan's Column. Among the artists and architects represented are Adolfo Wildt, Gio Ponti and Lucio Fontana, and the tombs are as much a survey of Italian sculpture as a record of who lived and died in Milan.

More than two hundred prominent figures are buried or commemorated here, among them the conductor Arturo Toscanini, the fashion designer Franco Moschino and the racing driver Alberto Ascari, twice Formula One world champion. The cemetery also holds a piece of social history: its crematorium temple, built in 1876, was the first crematorium to open in the Western world, and it remained in use until 1992.

Milan, the capital of Lombardy and Italy's economic centre, grew rapidly in the decades when the cemetery was built, and the Monumentale reflects that confidence: a portrait of the city's 19th-century rise told in stone.

Getting there

The Cimitero Monumentale lies on the northern edge of central Milan, a short walk from the Porta Garibaldi district and Milano Porta Garibaldi railway station; the Monumentale stop of metro line M5 serves the entrance. The nearest airport is Milano Linate (LIN), about 9 km away; Milan Malpensa (MXP) is the city's main intercontinental airport.

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Monumental Cemetery of Milan

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

Plan your visit

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