While There’s Still Time

The memorial hosted other events, but eventually faded from the limelight. The National Park Service took over the monument in the 1960s and performed minimal maintenance.

In the six years since that first column, the number of people interested in the memorial grew from a small group of local activists to a larger crowd seeking some kind of national World War I memorial. The efforts gained traction as it rallied in the name of Frank Buckles, the 109-year-old last surviving U.S. veteran of the War to End All Wars.

The national designation is still being debated in the U.S. Congress, but work crews began cleaning and repairing the monument in October. With funding from last year’s federal economic stimulus action, the repairs to the cracked dome and columns will show that, at the least, someone still remembers.

Sometimes, however, remembrance is more than a monument. For once city in Italy, it’s a cemetery.

Staglieno – officially Camposanto di Staglieno – in Genoa isn’t just any cemetery, however. It’s the Louvre/Prado/Hermitage/Tate of marble, and probably one of the most-overlooked art treasures in the world; and at least one American stone carver is giving the area some due attention.

Staglieno is one of the first of the great European cemeteries (including the Père Lachaise in Paris) resulting from Napoleon’s decree of the early 19th century to establish burial places outside cities and away from houses of worship. Conceived in the mid-1830s, work finally began on the site in 1844; the burials began in 1851.

What makes Staglieno special isn’t so much the architecture (including a replica of Rome’s Parthenon) or the list of those interned. It’s the marble memorials commissioned by families and friends of the dead that make Staglieno a stunning exhibition of the stone carver’s craft.

The work in Staglieno is far beyond the engraved tombstone, with incredibly lifelike statuary of angels and mortals, flora and fauna, fanastical beasts and common books. Nobody, it seems, accepted anything second-best when it came to Staglieno.

The cemetery is also one of the few places that inspired funereal copycat work. The angel for the Oneto family tomb, carved by Giulo Monteverde, may be the most-famous work at Staglieno; if you’ve spent any time walking a U.S. cemetery, you’ve probably seen a reproduction of the curly-tressed cherub with the crossed arms.

The work at Staglieno is one of the passions of Walter S. Arnold, a Chicago-based stone carver who, after apprenticing in Italy and working on the National Cathedral in Washington, opened his own studio in 1985. While he’s worked on a wide variety of commissions (and made a particular specialty of gargoyles), it’s clear that he continues to be inspired by the artisans represented at Staglieno.