The Lupi Cemetery

Wondering if “in the shadow of the cypresses and inside the urns comforted by crying the sleep of death is perhaps less hard or not”, I enter the Cimitero dei Lupi, or La Cigna Municipal Cemetery, today at the edge of the port and industrial area of ​​the city ​​of Livorno, near the Cigna stream, in the locality of Santo Stefano dei Lupi. The area takes its name from the Lupi’s Gronda, a vast area that in medieval times extended from Pisa to the village of Labron, so-called by the landowning family. It was precisely the edict of San Cloud, in 1804, to which Foscolo refers in the poem “I Sepolcri”, together with a concomitant yellow fever epidemic, to decree the birth of the new cemetery.

It is a September afternoon, the air is still and warm. I immediately notice the renovated flower stalls, before passing the entrance. The Mortuary is crowded, alas, with both the dead and the living, every day there is always someone who leaves and someone forced to cry. The small church of San Tobia (19th century) welcomes me with its bare walls and a couple of dark but pleasant paintings.

Designed by the architect Riccardo Calocchieri, completed by Pampaloni and Diletti, and finally enlarged by Unis, the cemetery was consecrated in October 1822. Further transformations took place from 1910 to the present day. It consists mainly of earthen graves.

Apart from the small crowd gathered in front of the morgue, the place is deserted. Let us reflect on how much the cult of the dead is waning in current generations and how, once those old people who made the cemetery a biweekly destination disappear, in the future almost no one will cross the monumental avenue that connects the entrance to the classical portico added by Unis. The shuttle that is supposed to carry the elderly and disabled turns around in circles among the cypresses. I am struck by the silence, the sense of (eternal) peace.

The first part of the avenue is the oldest and best kept, full of monuments dating back to the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The tomb of Andrea Sgarallino (1935–1887) stands out as the flag of his country and work. Patriot together with his brother Jacopo, enrolled in Mazzini’s Young Italy, he distinguished himself in the defense of Livorno from the Austrian siege in 1849. Just from Santo Stefano ai Lupi, at six in the morning of May 10, the first Austrian cannonades were heard. By May 11 it was all over. Only a few decades later, the remains of the Leghorns shot were transferred to the Lupi, where Lorenzo Gori sculpted a commemorative monument.

Like the Sgarallino brothers, I also meet Oreste Franchini, who had Mazzini as master and Garibaldi as duce and whose ashes still await the advent of the ideal that was his whole life.

I come across well-known names, such as Cesare Alemà, whose monument is surmounted by a Garibaldian cap, bayonet, sword, flag, trumpet, laurel leaves; Enrico Bartelloni; Francesco Chiusa; Giuseppe Ravenna and other personalities of the Italian Risorgimento but also of the anti-fascist struggle, such as Ilio Barontini and Vasco Jacoponi.

Each monumental tomb has its own story to tell, its tears and its memory. I like to remember one of the many, certainly less known, the one built in 1919 for Emma Zigoli.

Emma was eighteen and had her whole life ahead of her that evening, while, dressed up, cheerful and carefree, she went to dance in the headquarters of the Republican Party, looking forward to the fun, the gossip with her friends, the admiring glances of the suitors. But there was a shooting in front of the Party and a bullet hit her, killing her. The Party had the monument built in honor of the innocent victim who was killed on the evening of September 10 1919 for human crimes and since then it has kept the bodies of all the Zigoli, of her brother Toselli — who fell hero on Montello rejecting the invader, and who certainly bore his destiny written in his name, calling himself after the heroic major who died to defend the Italian position on the Amba Alagi plateau — of Giuseppe, of Barbara — become blind, it is said, from the great crying because of her children’s death — of Natale, of Esmeraldo — which everyone called only Smeraldo and, who knows why, the E of the name on the tombstone always continues to fall.

I am struck by the Christ portrayed by Giacomo Zilocchi for the Soriani family, and the monument to the imperishable and glorious memory of the Leghorns who died in Mentana, but also the tomb that awaits the body of the twenty-year-old young man Alfredo Z. who, struck by contagious illness, lies in a foreign land where there is a law that prohibits exhumation for ten years. Died in Marseille in 1882, I wonder if the young man ever returned home.

As I proceed along the avenue, the monuments become more majestic and at the same time more modern, I recognize the names of many families known in Livorno in the commercial and port field, from Fremura, to Debatte, to Tanzini to La Comba. Some tombs have various secular and religious symbols, from menorah, the seven-branched Jewish candelabra, to Masonic designs.

The cemetery also houses the shrines that collect the remains of the partisans, the fallen from the 1915–1918 war, the civilian and military victims of the Second World War and the Italian and British soldiers who died in the 1971 plane crash, when, on November 9, an English R.A.F plane crashed into the sea off the Meloria with its load of young Italian parakeets.

Many names flow before my eyes, soldiers who lost their lives fighting, civilians who died under bombing, like the twenty-three year old Lora, but also tombstones in memory of deaths unknown to me but known to God.

The “Square of the French” constitutes the area of ​​the graves of the soldiers who fell during the Great War, some of them of Muslim origin. The bodies are lined up, the Catholics have a cross while the Muslims have an arch. But I see that these dead were destined not to rest in peace, that the horror of war had to pursue them even in the afterlife, if in September 1943 “a large-caliber bomb destroyed 34 out of 54 of the graves”, and the remains are now collected under a single tombstone.

The image of peace and pleasantness, of a well-preserved cemetery, fades as I approach the loggia. I reach the intercolonio, under Unis’ portico, which houses notable Apuan marble works. Abandonment and decay reign here, the pigeons have smeared the floor and the graves with their excrement; everything is decay, I see signs of work in progress that never seem to progress. I flee attacked by swarms of mosquitoes from the nearby stream. I prefer the month of November, when the skies are furrowed by flocks of starlings that draw curlicues among the cypresses.

To the east stands the new complex of loculi, very well kept, unlike the loggias; towards the south we find the Cinerary Temple, an imposing monumental structure built in the early twentieth century on behalf of the Cremation Society. Anyone who has seen a loved one cremated knows what it feels like when the coffin enters the cremator, sliding on the trolley, and then, when the operation is complete, the attendant hands you a brush with which to collect the ashes of your extinct yourself, as it was at least untill the eighties.

Signs posted on the columbaria inform us that the ossuaries have a duration of thirty years while the loculi of fifty, after which they will proceed to the ex officio exhumation and the dispersion of remains and ashes in common ossuaries, but the thought on the moment does not worry me.

Other areas of the cemetery are dedicated to the various religious and national communities present in Livorno, such as the “Square of the Evangelists”.

The “Waldensian’s Square ” and the “Turkish’s Square” are two pre-existing cemeteries incorporated into the current burial ground, which covers 110,000 square meters and houses about 190,000 bodies. In the Turkish’s Square I am struck by the writings in Arabic and by the Turkish Memet Neyal’s tomb. He was native of Alexandra of Egypt, a model of public and private citizen virtues and he selflessly used his possessions to protect friends. I am sorry to discover that he died in 1846.

An arch dating back to 1893 contains the names of all the Leghorns who served in Garibaldi’s ranks, some of whom are buried under tombstones decorated with the Garibaldian cap. If these deaths arouse respect and historical interest in me, the ones of children dead in the prime of life make my skin crawl, covered as they are with soft, old weather-damaged toys, yellowed girlfriends’ cards, amaranth pennants.

With this sad thought I go to the exit, but first I pause in front of the plaque dedicated to Bruna Barbieri, known as La Ciucia, a strong, generous commoner, always ready to immediately give, full of passion, of enthusiasm, anti-fascist but loved even by her enemies who recognized her strength, her wild innocence. The tombstone was strongly desired by her great-granddaughter Tiziana and so it recites:

“In memory of Bruna Barbieri known as La Ciucia. Born and lived in the district of Venice, pure soul, generous heart, example of rare generosity, lost among the atrocities of the last war”.