Verano Cemetery

The Verano Cemetery is at Piazzale del Verano 1, in the Tiburtino district, backed against the Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le mura and a stone's throw from the University City. Admission is open and free, as in every Roman municipal cemetery. The hours are seasonal: from April 1 to September 30 from 7:30 to 19:00, from October 1 to March 31 from 7:30 to 18:00, every day, with last entry one hour before closing. The information number given by the tourist portal of Roma Capitale is 06 49236331, and the city switchboard 060608 answers for service updates. You get there by bus 71, which stops at Piazzale del Verano on its circular run from Tiburtina station, and by trams 3 and 19, which have a stop at Verano along the route between Porta Maggiore and Valle Giulia. The Roman tram network, however, is affected by widespread construction work and several stretches run with replacement buses that carry the same number, so it's best to check the day's service on the transport company's website. Whoever arrives by metro gets off on line B at Policlinico or at Tiburtina and walks a quarter of an hour. The free guided tours organized by the Cimiteri Capitolini are booked at 328 7561996 or by writing to cultura.cimitericapitolini@amaroma.it, and leave from the monumental entrance. No ticket is needed and no booking to get in: what you need is to know where to go, because 83 hectares crossed without a route are covered without seeing anything.

To frame the context it's best to keep the cemetery and the church beside it together: the page dedicated to San Lorenzo fuori le mura tells of the basilica from which this entire funerary quarter was born, 20 centuries ago.

Where the Verano Cemetery Is and How You Really Get There

The Verano occupies the plateau and the rise between Via Tiburtina, the San Lorenzo rail yard and Viale Regina Elena. It's a piece of city inside the city: 83 hectares divided into 21 zones, served by nine entrances, with an internal naming system made of avenues, plots and progressive numbers. Whoever enters for the first time almost always makes the same mistake: heads straight for the quadriporticus, photographs the columns and leaves convinced they've seen the Verano. They've seen the atrium.

The Entrances of the Verano Cemetery

The monumental entrance, the one with the three arches and the four statues, opens on Piazzale del Verano and is the only one worth using the first time, because it's the door the architect conceived to stage the passage. The other gates are distributed along Via Tiburtina and Via del Verano and serve mostly the residents of the neighborhood and people coming to visit their family. If someone is driving you, ask for Via Tiburtina entrance: it lets you off closer to the upper zones.

By Public Transport to the Verano Cemetery

Line 71 is the simplest solution for those arriving at Tiburtina station: the route touches the station forecourt, Via Tiburtina, Piazzale del Verano, Piazzale Tiburtino and Piazza di Porta San Lorenzo, so it leaves you in front of the gate. Trams 3 and 19 connect the Verano to Porta Maggiore on one side and to Viale Regina Margherita, the Valle Giulia museums and Villa Borghese on the other: they're the best choice if you want to link the visit to another stop of the day. From Termini you get there in about 10 minutes by bus, or in 25 minutes of walking along Via Tiburtina, a route that crosses the San Lorenzo neighborhood and deserves it in itself.

By Car, and the Question of the Internal Shuttle

Driving inside a cemetery sounds strange to anyone who isn't Roman, but at the Verano the distances justify it: from the monumental entrance to the last plot of the upper zone it's kilometers. The managing body provides a free shuttle that leaves from the square and makes a loop with about 20 stops, with the first run in the morning and the last before closing. Access with your own vehicle is regulated and on weekdays is generally reserved for people with documented needs, with exceptions for people with disabilities, pregnant women and the elderly. The rules change over time and on holidays: the gatehouse at the entrance answers and clarifies everything in 30 seconds.

Hours, Silence and Good Manners at the Verano Cemetery

The Verano is not a museum and shouldn't be treated as one. It's a cemetery in use, where funerals are held every day and where people come to visit their dead. You keep your voice low, you don't photograph visitors, you don't touch the portraits, you don't rest bags and cameras on the gravestones. Whoever comes for funerary art has every right to be there, as long as they remember they share the space with people who came in mourning. It's a rule of civility before it is a regulation.

Why It's Called Verano

The name has nothing funereal about it: it comes from the land. The area corresponded to the agro verano, the field of the gens Verania, a senatorial family of the Republican age that owned those lands along Via Tiburtina. When in the 19th century the new cemetery had to be baptized, the rural place name was still alive in the local speech and they limited themselves to recording it. Since then Romans have shortened it further: nobody in Rome says the monumental municipal cemetery Campo Verano, you say the Verano and that's it, and the same word indicates the cemetery, the square, the tram stop and even the surrounding neighborhood. It's one of those cases where the place naming anticipates bureaucracy by 2,000 years.

20 Centuries of Burials: The Necropolis Under the Verano Cemetery

The Verano invents nothing: it continues. Under and beside the modern cemetery runs a system of funerary galleries of the imperial age, the catacombs of Santa Ciriaca, linked by tradition to the matron who is said to have buried the deacon Lawrence after his martyrdom in 258. On that tomb Constantine had a cemetery basilica erected, and around that basilica centuries of burials settled. The hill we now call the Pincetto is in large part made of this: fill earth on top of burial earth.

It's worth understanding this before going in, because it changes the perception of the levels. When you walk on the high rise of the Verano you are not climbing a natural hill, you are climbing a funerary accumulation. The phenomenon of the Roman underground cemeteries, with its legal rules and its digging techniques, is told at length in the page on the catacombs of Rome: reading it first makes legible what at the Verano you only sense.

The Birth of the Verano Cemetery: The Edict of Saint Cloud and Giuseppe Valadier

On June 12, 1804 Napoleon signs at Saint Cloud an edict that revolutionizes the European relationship with death: burials leave the churches and the built-up centers and are concentrated in extramural enclosures, the same for everyone, with regulated gravestones. It's a hygienic rule and at the same time a political one, because it takes away from the chapters and confraternities the control of the bodies of the dead. Rome, annexed to the Empire, has to comply.

The architects Giuseppe Camporese and Raffaele Stern receive the commission to identify two suitable areas outside the walls and indicate the Pigneto Sacchetti and the Campo Verano. The final design passes to Giuseppe Valadier, the man who in those same years was redesigning the Pincio and Piazza del Popolo: the hand that gave Rome its neoclassical drawing room is the same that gave it its cemetery. Work begins around 1811.

The Interrupted Site, the Resumption and the Cholera of 1837

In 1814 Napoleon abdicates, the papal government returns and the site stops. The notable thing is that the rule stays: the papal administration, which dismantles much of the French legislation, doesn't go back on extramural burial. The Verano begins to grow again in the 1830s under Gregory XVI, and receives a brutal push in 1837, when the cholera epidemic kills over 13,000 people in Rome. Health emergencies have built more cemeteries than regulations have.

Pius IX, Vespignani and the Verano We See Today

With the election of Pius IX in 1846 the Campo Verano is already in operation, but it is still a utilitarian enclosure. The transformation into a monumental cemetery, with porticoes, aediculae, chapels and staircases, is due to Virginio Vespignani, the pope's trusted architect, who between the 1850s and the 1880s builds the church of Santa Maria della Misericordia, consecrated in 1860, the great quadriporticus and the monumental entrance. After him the direction of the works passes to Agostino Mercandetti and Gioacchino Ersoch between 1880 and 1906, and in the 20th century Raffaele De Vico intervenes, who signs the ossuary for the fallen of the Great War.

An opinion, and a firm one: the Verano is the only great Roman monument of the 19th century that never suffered the inferiority complex toward the ancient. Here the papal architects built without quoting the Forums, without imitating the baths, without redoing yet another temple. They invented a new form, and that form held.

The Expansion, the Horse Tramway and the Closing of the Cycle

The Verano Cemetery grows through the whole 19th century and half of the 20th, and with it grows the need to connect it to the city: on November 1, 1879 a horse-drawn tramway is inaugurated between Termini station and the cemetery, one of the first public rail transport lines of post-unification Rome. In 1927 the line becomes electric and takes the number 53. The run of the living toward the dead, on the day of the dead, was for decades one of the city's traffic peaks. The expansions stop in the 1960s, when the Flaminio cemetery at Prima Porta comes into operation and the Verano stops being the cemetery of all Romans to become that of Roman memory.

The Monumental Entrance of the Verano Cemetery

The front on Piazzale del Verano is a theatrical construction: a central vaulted portico, crossed by three arches, with two side turrets that give it the rhythm of a city gate. Vespignani conceives it between the 1860s and the 1870s, and the result is a building that works as a declared threshold. You enter, you lose the noise of the square, you enter another rule.

The Four Statues at the Entrance of the Verano Cemetery

Above the portico four large female figures in marble keep watch, completed in 1877, personifying as many dispositions of the soul before death. Meditation and Prayer are by Francesco Fabi Altini, Hope is by Stefano Galletti, Silence is by Giuseppe Blasetti. Look at them from below and then step back 20 meters: they change completely, because they are calculated for the distance of the square and not for the space under the portico. Blasetti's Silence, with the finger on the lips, is the most cited and the least looked at, crushed as it is by the habit of photographing it and moving on.

The Hidden Tombs in the Entrance Portico

Few look up at the walls of the portico, and they're wrong: there lie buried the architect himself, Virginio Vespignani, together with his son Francesco, and with them the engraver Paolo Mercuri, Luigi Santarelli and Augusto Cataldi. It's an old and very Roman choice: whoever builds the door gets buried in the door. It's worth the minute it costs to stop and read the gravestones before moving on.

The Quadriporticus, Architectural Heart of the Verano Cemetery

Past the entrance the quadriporticus opens, a vast porticoed enclosure that Vespignani starts around 1859 and that is completed in 1880. It's the space that gives the Verano its identity: a secular cloister, measured, where the colonnade orders the burials in a sequence that reads like a page. The sources vary on the starting date of the site, and in fact the work proceeded in lots for 20 years.

Ansiglioni's Redeemer

At the center of the quadriporticus stands the marble statue of Christ the Redeemer sculpted by Leopoldo Ansiglioni in 1887. It's a work that divides: some find it rhetorical and some consider it the balance point of the whole layout. In our judgment it works for reasons of staging more than of sculpture, because it is placed exactly on the axis that links the entrance to the church and closes the perspective without closing it entirely.

The Church of Santa Maria della Misericordia

At the back of the quadriporticus opens the small church of Santa Maria della Misericordia, consecrated in 1860, work of the same Vespignani. Inside it keeps an altarpiece painted by Tommaso Minardi in 1861, with the Madonna and Child, Saint Lawrence and the souls of purgatory: a composition of Raphaelesque layout, of deliberately popular tone, meant to be understood by those who came in to pray and not by those who came in to judge. Minardi, who was one of the masters of Roman Purism, is buried a few meters away, in the colonnade.

Who Rests Under the Colonnade of the Verano Cemetery

The quadriporticus is a gallery of monumental burials of 19th-century and post-unification Rome. There rest the Sardinian politician Giorgio Asproni, the Garibaldian general Giacomo Medici, Cardinal Carlo Luigi Morichini, the painter Tommaso Minardi, Admiral Simone Pacoret de Saint-Bon, the statesman Silvio Spaventa, and you can read the gravestones of Giuseppe Del Rosso, Luigi Maria Rezzi and Euclide Turba. Walking along the portico reading the names in sequence is the quickest way to understand who ran Rome between Pius IX and Giolitti.

The Zones of the Verano Cemetery, One by One

The 21 zones of the Verano do not have the same character and are not visited the same way. It's worth knowing them beforehand, because the difference between a successful visit and an empty loop is all here.

The Old Pincetto and the New Pincetto

The Pincetto is the rise that dominates the cemetery on the western side, toward the Basilica of San Lorenzo, and is divided into the old Pincetto, which corresponds to zone IV, and the new Pincetto, zone VI. It is the part densest with sculptures of the 19th and early 20th centuries, the one where the Roman funerary repertoire gives its best: angels, marble veils, bust portraits, allegories of grief. If you have only one hour, spend it here and give up the rest.

The Scogliera del Monte

Built between 1870 and 1876, the Scogliera del Monte is a system of terraces built with blocks of tuff, the local stone of the Roman hills, that support overlapping rows of marble stelae. It is the technical solution to a problem of slope, become a piece of landscape: from afar it looks like an inhabited cliff. At sunset the raking light on the tuff produces an effect that no backlit photograph renders.

The Caracciolo Ramp and the Tomb of Trilussa

The Caracciolo Ramp is a work of 1918 by the architect Corrado Cianferoni, a monumental climb that solves the difference in level toward the upper zones. In the 1950s the tomb of Carlo Alberto Salustri was placed there, the poet everyone knows as Trilussa, who died in 1950 after being named senator for life a few weeks earlier. The placement is perfect for him: not in a family chapel, but on a passage ramp, where people walk.

The Military Shrine of the Verano Cemetery

In zone XVI is the military shrine, built between 1922 and 1931 to a design by Raffaele De Vico. The layout is that of a theatrical hemicycle: a central altar framed by a semicircular marble wall on which the names of the fallen are carved, with the Latin inscription Suis civibus in acie interemptis Roma mater, Mother Rome to her own citizens killed in battle. 4,978 soldiers rest there, 2,847 from the First World War and 2,131 from the Second, of whom 214 never identified. De Vico, who designed gardens and public parks in Rome, works here by subtraction: no triumphalism, no winged victory. Only names.

The Egyptian Temple and the First Roman Cremation

In zone XI stands a small building of Egyptianizing taste built between 1882 and 1883 to a design by Salvatore Rosa. It wasn't a chapel: it was the crematorium furnace of the Society for the Incineration of Corpses, and on April 16, 1883 the first cremation took place there. In a city governed by the pope until 13 years earlier, incineration was a political declaration before it was a funerary choice, and the Egyptian language served precisely to place the operation outside Christian symbolism. The building was restored in 1938 and the furnace was decommissioned in 1980.

The Non-Catholic, Jewish and Islamic Sections

The Verano is also a map of the religious affiliations of contemporary Rome. Zone XII hosts the Evangelical section, with its temple, the children's section, the cinerary sections and the ossuaries. Zone X holds the Islamic burials. Next to the municipal cemetery extends the Jewish cemetery, opened at the end of the 19th century, which is an autonomous entity and has its own access rules. For the burial of non-Catholic foreigners Rome already had the enclosure at the foot of the Pyramid, told in the page on the Non-Catholic Cemetery of Rome, which remains the obligatory term of comparison for anyone who wants to understand how the city handled for two centuries the death of those who were not of the Roman faith.

The Mausoleum of the War Maimed and Disabled

Built in 1989 to a design by A. Barbagallo in reinforced concrete and travertine for the national association of the war maimed and disabled, it is one of the few contemporary interventions of scale inside the cemetery. The purists of the 19th century don't like it much. I find it interesting because it shows that the Verano is not a frozen enclosure: it keeps producing architecture, with the means and the language of its own time.

Filippo Severati, the Painter of the Verano Cemetery

If the Verano has an absolute unicum, it isn't an architecture: it's a technique. Filippo Severati, a Roman, who lived between 1819 and 1892, trained at the Accademia di San Luca in the orbit of Tommaso Minardi and active as a draftsman and engraver for the Calcografia Camerale, perfected a process of enamel painting on supports of porcelain and volcanic lava, fired several times. The papal ministry granted him a patent for this method toward the end of the 1850s, and the document is kept in the State Archive of Rome.

Why Those Portraits Are Still Intact

The reason it's worth looking for them lies entirely in a material observation: they have been outdoors for over 140 years, exposed to rain, frost and the smog of Via Tiburtina, and they still have the colors of a painting just finished. Enamel fired at high temperature on lava is chemically inert: it doesn't fade, doesn't flake, doesn't yellow. Severati jealously guarded the secret of the process, which remained unknown for decades after his death.

A Gallery of the Roman Bourgeoisie, Signed and Numbered

From 1867 on Severati devoted himself almost exclusively to funerary portraiture, and at the Verano about 250 of his works can be counted. Each enamel carries the signature, the date and a progressive number: the result is a cataloged gallery, a visual archive of the Roman bourgeoisie of the late 19th century. There's Edvige Petri with her hair gathered and her head veiled, Delia Sinimberghi with the red velvet jacket trimmed in lace and the dark gaze, the little Giacomo and Candida Cardini in sailor blouses, and above all Emma Massoli, the most famous, with disheveled hair and a coral necklace with a little cross. None of these faces has the funereal composure one expects of a cemetery: they are portraits of the living, hung on tombs.

Severati also worked for the cemeteries of Orvieto, Arezzo, Ascoli Piceno, Viterbo, Frascati and Frosinone, but it's at the Verano that the phenomenon reaches critical mass, and it's at the Verano that he himself is buried. The modern rediscovery of his work comes from an article published in 1983 in the magazine Frigidaire by the photographer Claudio G. Pisani, who put the images and the patent papers back into circulation. Before then those faces were in front of everyone's eyes and in nobody's bibliography.

The Sculptors and Architects of the Verano Cemetery

The Verano is, by density, the largest collection of Italian sculpture between the 19th and 20th centuries that can be visited for free. The list of authors active here looks like a textbook index: Giulio Monteverde, the best-selling name of Italian sculptural verismo, Ettore Ferrari, author of the Giordano Bruno of Campo de' Fiori, Ettore Ximenes, Giovanni Maria Benzoni, Pietro Canonica, who has a museum all his own at Villa Borghese, Publio Morbiducci, Duilio Cambellotti, Mirko Basaldella, Arnaldo Zocchi, Cesare Maccari, the painter of the Senate chamber, Roberto Bompiani. For funerary architecture, beside Vespignani and Ersoch, there appear Gaetano Koch, the man of the Umbertine palazzi of Piazza dell'Esedra, Corrado Cianferoni, Pio and Marcello Piacentini. The art glass bears the signature of Cesare Picchiarini, the master who taught modern stained glass in Rome to Cambellotti and the Bragaglias.

The styles follow one another without a break and can be read by walking: neoclassicism in the oldest zones, realism and verismo in the second half of the 19th century, eclecticism and symbolism around 1900, Liberty in the first two decades of the 20th century, and even Futurist accents. A cemetery is the place where style arrives 10 years late and stays 20 years longer: for this very reason it's a better statistical sample than any museum.

The Bombing of July 19, 1943

The current configuration of the Verano Cemetery is the child of one particular morning. On July 19, 1943 Allied aviation struck the Tiburtino district and the San Lorenzo rail yard, and the cemetery was hit squarely. The damage concentrated in three areas: the monumental entrance with the quadriporticus and the Pincetto, the management offices, the area in front of the military shrine. A stretch of the perimeter walls collapsed causing victims, and other people died among the florists and marble workers who worked in the square. Among the damaged tombs were those of Ettore Petrolini and of the Pacelli family, the family of Pius XII, the pope who that same afternoon showed up at San Lorenzo among the people, with his robe stained with blood.

The quadriporticus was rebuilt in 1947 and the shrine restored. Whoever looks carefully at the columns and the facings still recognizes the suture points between the 19th-century marble and the postwar additions. It's the only case in Rome where a cemetery is at once a burial place and a monument to itself, wounded by a bombing and restored as a victim.

A Curiosity About the Verano Cemetery

The Verano's most solid curiosity doesn't concern a famous dead person, it concerns a patent. In the papal Rome of the 1850s a painter obtained from the papal ministry the industrial privilege on a method of painting by fire on volcanic lava: a technology, registered the way a chemical process is registered, applied to the portrait of the dead. Filippo Severati became to all effects an entrepreneur, defined in the documents with the term porcellanista, and built a market where none existed before. Roman families had their dead portrayed from life, on a support that time could not touch.

The consequence is an oddity you only catch by walking: the Verano is the cemetery where the faces look. In almost all European monumental cemeteries the portrait is statuary, idealized, marble. Here, on hundreds of tombs, there is a photograph that is not a photograph, hand-painted, in full colors, with the rosy complexion and the red velvet, and with eyes that follow whoever passes. The feeling of being watched, at the Pincetto, is not a literary effect: it's a designed optical effect, and well designed.

I add a detail that Romans almost always miss. Each Severati enamel carries a progressive number, which means that gallery is, in fact, a catalog with its internal bookkeeping. Counting the missing numbers along the series amounts to reconstructing how many works have been lost in 140 years among bombings, thefts and expired concessions. It's archival work that someone has begun and nobody has yet finished.

Something Nobody Tells You About the Verano Cemetery

That at the Verano there are empty tombs, and not because of desecration. The most celebrated funerary monument of the cemetery, that of Goffredo Mameli, does not contain Goffredo Mameli. The Municipality of Rome announced the competition for the tomb in 1889, the Sicilian sculptor Luciano Campisi won it, and the work was solemnly inaugurated on July 26, 1891: peperino, Ravaccione marble from Carrara and bronze, the figure of the young man wrapped in the flag and stretched over an urn, backed against an architectural backdrop on three steps, with the lyre and the sword as emblems and the Capitoline she-wolf as crowning. It is on the left of the entrance avenue, between plots 1S and 3S. In 1941 the remains of the author of the national anthem were moved to the Garibaldian Ossuary Mausoleum on the Janiculum, together with the fallen of the Roman Republic, and the later inscription on the monument records it. The tomb remained: the buried man did not.

It's not an isolated case. Grazia Deledda, Nobel laureate in literature, died on August 15, 1936 and was buried here, but in 1959, at the request of her relatives and with the help of a state law of 1953, her remains returned to Sardinia, in a black granite sarcophagus in the church of the Madonna della Solitudine, at the foot of the Ortobene, in Nuoro. Sergio Leone rested at the Verano until 1997, when he was moved to Pratica di Mare. The singer-songwriter Umberto Bindi was moved to Bogliasco. The Vietnamese cardinal Nguyên Van Thuân was brought in 2012 to the Roman church of Santa Maria della Scala.

The practical moral is simple and no guide puts it in writing: the lists of illustrious people buried at the Verano that circulate online are in large part historical lists, not topographical ones. Before crossing 83 hectares to look for a specific tomb, it's best to verify that the tomb is still there. At the windows of the monumental entrance the staff query the register by first and last name and in two minutes tell you plot and avenue.

The Advice I Give You for Visiting the Verano Cemetery

Go in early in the morning, between eight and 10, on a weekday that isn't close to November 2. It's the only window in which the Verano is what it should be: silent, with the low light cutting across the quadriporticus, without the commemoration buses and without the heat that on the upper zones, in summer, becomes unbearable because shade is scarce and the marble gives back heat until evening.

Then give yourself a route rule, because 83 hectares punish improvisers. The recommended loop is this: monumental entrance, reading of the four statues from the square and not from underneath, quadriporticus clockwise reading the names of the colonnade, a stop in the church of Santa Maria della Misericordia for Minardi's altarpiece, then the climb to the old Pincetto and the search for Severati's enamels, descent along the Scogliera del Monte, Caracciolo Ramp with Trilussa's tomb, and closing at the military shrine. It's two and a half hours walking slowly. Whoever has only one hour skips the shrine and stays on the Pincetto.

Three practical things that make the difference. Closed shoes with a real sole: the secondary avenues are packed earth, the steps are uneven and wet marble is a skating rink. Water with you, because the internal fountains exist but are not everywhere. And a notebook or the phone to note plot and avenue every time you find something notable, because going back without a numeric reference is almost impossible.

Last advice, and it's the one that matters most: don't come to the Verano with the idea of collecting tombs of famous people. It's the surest way to see nothing. The Verano is a museum of 19th- and 20th-century sculpture in which the masterpieces are on the tombs of people nobody remembers, commissioned by families who wanted to prove something. Whoever looks only for the known names walks past 50 extraordinary sculptures without turning their head.

Another Well-Known Fact, Yet Rarely Cited

That the first crematorium furnace in Rome was lit inside the Verano Cemetery, and that the building that housed it still exists. It's a fact known to insiders and systematically absent from popular accounts, which prefer the tombs of the stars. And yet it says much more about the city.

Built between 1882 and 1883 to a design by Salvatore Rosa, the little temple adopted an Egyptianizing architectural language for a reason that was not decorative. Cremation, in post-unification Italy, was the banner of secularism and Freemasonry: the Church considered it an affirmation of materialism and formally forbade it to Catholics until 1963. Building a crematorium furnace in Rome in 1882, 12 years after the breach of Porta Pia, was a political act carried out in the city that had been the capital of the Papal State. Using for that building the vocabulary of pharaonic Egypt, and neither the Christian nor the classical one, served to place the operation outside the two traditions in conflict.

The first cremation took place on April 16, 1883, promoted by the Society for the Incineration of Corpses. The little temple was restored in 1938 and the furnace stayed in operation until 1980. Whoever passes through zone XI today sees a small building with an Egyptian gorge cornice and mistakes it for the eccentric chapel of a family with a taste for the exotic. It is instead one of the most eloquent documents of the conflict between State and Church in Rome at the end of the 19th century, and it has held up better than many speeches.

I add the flip side, because history is more interesting when it isn't one-sided: just as the liberal State was lighting the furnace, the papal administration had already accepted for 70 years the Napoleonic logic of burial outside the walls and had never gone back. The Verano is the place where the two Romes, the papal one and the secular one, coexisted in the same enclosure without ceasing to quarrel.

The Right Photo to Take at the Verano Cemetery

Before talking about framings, a premise that is not rhetorical: here you photograph the stones, not the people. Whoever is at the Verano for a bereavement has the right not to end up in a shot, and a camera pointed at a family gathered in front of a tomb is a serious discourtesy. That said, the Verano is one of the most photogenic places in Rome, and the right photograph is not the one everybody takes.

The one everybody takes is the colonnade of the quadriporticus in perspective, with the arches chasing each other. It always works, it's a correct photo and on average inert. If you want to take it, take it at eight in the morning in winter, when the light enters low from the east and the columns cast long shadows on the floor: at noon the same subject is flat.

The recommended photo is another one: an enamel portrait by Filippo Severati, framed tight, without the marble around. Look for one on the old Pincetto, stand face-on to avoid reflections on the enamel, and fill the frame with the face. The result throws off anyone who looks at it, because nobody can date it: it looks like a color photograph, the colors are those of an oil painting just finished, and the support is volcanic lava from 140 years ago. It's the only image of the Verano that doesn't resemble any other image of any other cemetery in Europe.

If you're looking for landscape instead, the Scogliera del Monte in the late afternoon is the best subject: the overlapping rows of white stelae on the brown tuff, with the raking light digging into the blocks, give a stratification you can't understand on a plan. Third subject, little visited: the front of De Vico's military shrine, shot straight on and centered, with the Latin inscription legible. It's clean rationalist architecture and photographing it without distortion requires stepping back quite a bit, which at the Verano you can do.

No bulky tripod, no drone, no posing. If you need a structured shoot or a permit for professional work, the cemetery management is the interlocutor and has to be contacted beforehand, not on the spot.

Some Important Events That Happened Here in History

The first event is the founding itself, and it's a European date before it is a Roman one. The edict of Saint Cloud of June 12, 1804 imposed burial outside inhabited centers throughout the Napoleonic empire, and in Rome, annexed to France, the rule produced the search for two extramural sites by Giuseppe Camporese and Raffaele Stern and the choice of the Campo Verano. The start of the site around 1811 to a design by Giuseppe Valadier is the moment when Rome stops burying its dead under the floor of the churches.

The second event is an epidemic. In 1837 cholera killed over 13,000 people in Rome, and the cemetery machine, still under construction, had to withstand the shock. It was that emergency that turned the Verano from an administrative project into a daily necessity, and made irreversible the choice made 30 years earlier.

The third event is the passage from papal Rome to Italian Rome, which here is read in stone. The quadriporticus completed in 1880, the church consecrated in 1860, the monumental entrance built by Vespignani for Pius IX coexist with the crematorium furnace of the secular society lit in 1883. In between, on November 1, 1879, the inauguration of the horse tramway between Termini and the cemetery: the proof that the Verano had become a mass urban service, with its traffic peaks and its economy of florists and marble workers.

The fourth event is the most tragic and the best known: the bombing of July 19, 1943. The Allied bombs on the San Lorenzo rail yard hit the quadriporticus, the Pincetto, the management offices and the shrine area. A stretch of the perimeter walls collapsed killing some people, florists and marble workers died on the square, and the tombs of Ettore Petrolini and of the Pacelli family were damaged. The quadriporticus was rebuilt in 1947. That morning marks the history of the San Lorenzo neighborhood as much as that of the cemetery, and the two things are not told separately.

The fifth event is silent and for that reason escapes notice: in the 1960s the opening of the Flaminio cemetery at Prima Porta closed the Verano's cycle of expansion. Since then the Verano is no longer the cemetery of all Romans. It has become their memory, with the problems of maintenance, expired concessions and restoration that every memory of 83 hectares brings.

Who Has Passed Through the Verano Cemetery

From its founding until the 1980s almost all Romans were buried at the Verano, and this makes the list of the illustrious longer than that of any other Italian cemetery. It's worth running through it by category, because that's how you understand what city we're talking about.

Literature and Thought

Here rests Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, the greatest poet in Romanesco, who died in 1863, and with him Carlo Alberto Salustri, Trilussa, who was the popular heir of that language. Giuseppe Ungaretti, one of the decisive names of 20th-century European poetry, Alberto Moravia, whose Roman home is told in the page on Casa Moravia, Sibilla Aleramo, Natalia Ginzburg and her husband Leone Ginzburg, who died in Regina Coeli prison in 1944, Massimo Bontempelli, the very young Sergio Corazzini, who died at 21 in 1907, the linguist Tullio De Mauro, the critic Alberto Asor Rosa, Gianni Rodari. There are also foreigners who chose Rome to die in, like the philosopher George Santayana and the English writer Ronald Firbank.

Cinema, Theater and Television

The Verano is the cemetery of Italian cinema. Vittorio De Sica, Marcello Mastroianni, Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman, Nino Manfredi, Gigi Proietti, Monica Vitti, Alida Valli, Massimo Girotti, Bud Spencer. The directors: Alessandro Blasetti, Sergio and Bruno Corbucci, Carlo Lizzani, Nanni Loy, Luigi Magni, Marco Ferreri, Raffaello Matarazzo, Mario Bonnard, Camillo Mastrocinque. The screenwriters Sergio Amidei and Ennio De Concini. The pioneer Filoteo Alberini and the producer Gustavo Lombardo. Neapolitan theater has its complete dynasty here, with Eduardo, Peppino, Luca and Luigi De Filippo. And there is Ettore Petrolini, the most Roman of comedians, whose tomb was hit by the bombs of 1943. Maurizio Costanzo, who died in 2023, is among the recent burials.

Music

Ennio Morricone, who died in 2020, has made the Verano a destination for enthusiasts from all over the world. With him Alfredo Casella, the baritone Tito Gobbi, the soprano Claudia Muzio, the conductor Franco Ferrara, the composer Cesare Andrea Bixio, the musicologist Remo Giazotto. On the popular side: Rino Gaetano, who died at 30 in 1981, Gabriella Ferri, Lando Fiorini, Bruno Martino, Stelvio Cipriani, Tata Giacobetti of the Quartetto Cetra.

Politics, Unions and the Risorgimento

Here are Pietro Nenni, Nilde Iotti, Giulio Andreotti, Ugo La Malfa, Luigi Longo, Giorgio Amendola, Giorgio Almirante, Emanuele Macaluso, Paolo Bufalini, Concetto Marchesi. The unions with Giuseppe Di Vittorio, Luciano Lama, Bruno Buozzi, killed by the Germans at La Storta in 1944. The Risorgimento with General Giacomo Medici, the patriot Mattia Montecchi, Rosalia Montmasson, the only woman on the expedition of the 1,000. And the anarchist Errico Malatesta, who died in Rome in 1932 under Fascist surveillance.

Art, Science and Sport

Giacomo Balla, a signature name of Futurism, the painters Mariano Fortuny, Nino Costa, Cesare Maccari, Tommaso Minardi, Giuseppe Capogrossi, the sculptors Giulio Monteverde, Ettore Ferrari, Pietro Canonica, Giovanni Maria Benzoni, the artist Fabio Mauri. The archaeologist Giovanni Battista de Rossi, founder of Christian archaeology, and Rodolfo Lanciani, the man who drew the plan of ancient Rome. The physicist Edoardo Amaldi, one of the boys of Via Panisperna, and the engineer Riccardo Morandi. Sport with Fulvio Bernardini and Attilio Ferraris, with the drivers Luigi Musso, Ignazio Giunti, Elio De Angelis and Andrea De Cesaris, all dead in a race or in practice, and with the coach Siniša Mihajlović, who died in 2022.

Stories the City Has Not Forgotten

There are also burials that tell Italian current events. Wilma Montesi, whose discovery on the beach at Torvaianica in 1953 opened one of the first great scandals of the Republic. Nicola Calipari, the official killed in Iraq in 2005. Clara Petacci. And the dead of the years of lead, of every side. A municipal cemetery doesn't select: it records. That's also why at the Verano you learn more contemporary history than in many museums.

Frequently Asked Questions About the Verano Cemetery

How much does it cost to enter the Verano Cemetery?

Admission to the Verano Cemetery, in Rome, is open and free, as in all the municipal cemeteries of the city. There is no ticket office and no ticket is required for visitors, Italian or foreign.

What are the hours of the Verano Cemetery?

The Verano Cemetery is open from April 1 to September 30 from 7:30 to 19:00, and from October 1 to March 31 from 7:30 to 18:00, every day, with last entry one hour before closing. It covers 83 hectares divided into 21 zones, with nine entrances along Via Tiburtina and Viale Regina Elena.

Is the Verano Cemetery wheelchair accessible?

The Verano Cemetery is partially accessible: the main avenues are asphalted, wide and passable in a wheelchair without difficulty, and an internal shuttle covers a large part of the perimeter. The upper zones, the Pincetto and the Scogliera del Monte, instead have staircases and uneven surfaces.

Are there free guided tours of the Verano Cemetery?

Yes, the body that runs the Capitoline cemeteries has organized for years a program of free guided tours inside the Verano Cemetery, divided into tens of themed itineraries that touch hundreds of burials: history of Rome, art history, cinema, sport and even a route by bicycle.

When to go to the Verano Cemetery?

The best season to visit the Verano Cemetery is late autumn, between the second half of November and December, or March, when the low light favors both the reading of the sculptures and photography. It's best to avoid the days around November 1 and 2, when the cemetery fills up for the commemoration.

Can you take photographs inside the Verano Cemetery?

At the Verano Cemetery you photograph the stones, not the people: whoever is present for a bereavement has the right not to end up in a shot, and a camera pointed at a family gathered in front of a tomb is a serious discourtesy. Respecting this rule, the cemetery is one of the most photogenic places in Rome.

Why is the Verano Cemetery called Verano?

The name of the Verano Cemetery comes from the land on which it stands: the area corresponded to the agro verano, the field of the gens Verania, a senatorial family of the Republican age that owned those lands along Via Tiburtina. When in the 19th century the new cemetery had to be baptized, the rural place name was still alive in the local speech.

What to see near the Verano Cemetery?

A few meters from the gate of the Verano Cemetery rises the Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le mura, one of the seven pilgrimage churches of Rome, born on the tomb of the martyred deacon and rebuilt after the bombings of 1943. Behind the basilica begins the San Lorenzo neighborhood, with its early 20th-century workers' apartment buildings.

The Free Guided Tours of the Verano Cemetery

The body that runs the Capitoline cemeteries has organized for years a program of free guided tours inside the Verano, divided into tens of themed itineraries that touch hundreds of burials: history of Rome, art history, sports stories, cinema, radio and television, women in history, and even a route by bicycle. The spring 2026 program ran between May 9 and June 2, with appointments on Saturday, Sunday and holidays, and the calendar is renewed with a second season between the end of summer and November.

Booking is mandatory and is done at the number 328 7561996, active Monday to Friday morning and afternoon and Saturday only in the morning, or by writing to cultura.cimitericapitolini@amaroma.it. The groups are small, the meeting point is the monumental entrance on Piazzale del Verano and the duration is an hour and a half or two. I advise calling well in advance, because places run out quickly and some itineraries are repeated only a few times a year.

If instead you're traveling with an organized group, with a school class or with corporate clients, professional accompaniment is something else than the free visit, and in a place like this the difference is felt above all in demeanor as well as in content: the team of licensed escorts and guides of TourLeaderPro for Rome works exactly on this kind of route, and the operational contacts are on the TourLeaderPro contacts page.

When to Go to the Verano Cemetery, and When to Avoid It

The best season is late autumn, between the second half of November and December, or March. The cemetery has little shade and in summer the upper zones become a griddle. In winter, instead, the low light favors both the reading of the sculptures and photography. Avoid without hesitation the days around November 1 and 2: they are the days of the commemoration, the Verano fills with tens of thousands of people, the avenues clog up and visiting out of artistic curiosity in the middle of that crowd is out of place even before it is uncomfortable.

Also avoid Monday early morning, when many funeral ceremonies are concentrated, and the central hours of rainy days, because the packed-earth avenues turn to mud and the marble steps are dangerous. The perfect window remains the weekday from eight to 11.

Accessibility and Visiting with Children

The Verano Cemetery is partially accessible. The main avenues are asphalted, wide and passable in a wheelchair without difficulty, and the internal shuttle covers a large part of the perimeter. The upper zones, the Pincetto and the Scogliera del Monte, instead have staircases, steep ramps and uneven surfaces: whoever gets around in a wheelchair can enjoy the quadriporticus, the church, the entrance avenue with the Mameli monument and the shrine area, but will have to give up part of the high route. For access with your own car in case of disability there are documented exceptions: it's best to ask at the gatehouse.

With children the visit works better than you'd think, as long as you don't pretend it's a park. Explain beforehand where you're going and why you keep your voice low. Then give them a concrete task: find Severati's painted portraits, count their progressive numbers, recognize the animals sculpted on the tombs. Kids respond well to monumental cemeteries when you treat them as serious places and not as attractions.

What to See Around the Verano Cemetery

The Verano is not visited alone: the neighborhood around it is one of the densest in Rome. A few meters from the gate rises the basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le mura, one of the seven pilgrimage churches of Rome, born on the tomb of the martyred deacon and itself devastated by the bombs of 1943 and rebuilt. Behind the basilica begins the San Lorenzo neighborhood, with its early 20th-century workers' apartment buildings, the workshops turned into cultural spaces and an evening life that resembles no other area of the city: the page on Container San Lorenzo tells of one of those places.

In 20 minutes on foot to the south you reach Holy Cross in Jerusalem and the stretch of the Aurelian Walls between Porta Maggiore and Porta San Lorenzo, which is the exact urban context in which the cemetery was conceived: outside the walls, precisely. On the opposite side, toward Viale Regina Elena, you enter the University City and its museums, among them the Gipsoteca of the Sapienza, which for those coming from the Verano is a natural continuation of the discussion on sculpture.

Whoever wants to build a whole itinerary on funerary Rome has three stops that complete each other: the Verano for the 19th and 20th centuries, the Non-Catholic Cemetery with the Pyramid of Cestius for the foreign Romantics, and the catacombs of Rome for Christian antiquity. A full day, and a single theme. If instead you're looking for monumental greenery with the opposite atmosphere, Villa Torlonia with the Casina delle Civette is a quarter of an hour away, and the stained glass of Cesare Picchiarini that you admire there is by the same master who worked on some chapels of the Verano.

For those planning a broader stay in Rome who read English, the 30 experiences selected in Best Things to Do in Rome and the outline of Rome in 3 Days help fit a morning at the Verano into a sensible program without sacrificing the Historic Center.

Quick Questions About the Verano Cemetery

How much does it cost to enter the Verano Cemetery?

Nothing. Admission is open and free, as in all the municipal cemeteries of Rome. There is no ticket office and no ticket is required for visitors, Italian or foreign.

What are the hours of the Verano Cemetery?

From April 1 to September 30 from 7:30 to 19:00. From October 1 to March 31 from 7:30 to 18:00. Every day, with last entry one hour before closing time. The hours of the administrative offices are different from those for access to the cemetery and vary in summer: for paperwork and concessions it's best to check the website of the Cimiteri Capitolini.

Where exactly is the Verano Cemetery?

At Piazzale del Verano 1, Tiburtino district, next to the Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le mura. Other entrances open on Via Tiburtina and Via del Verano.

Do you need to book to visit the Verano Cemetery?

Not for the free visit: you walk in and walk around. Yes for the free guided tours organized by the managing body, which are booked by phone or email and have limited places.

How long does it take to visit the Verano Cemetery?

An hour and a half for a quick loop that touches the entrance, the quadriporticus and the Pincetto. Two and a half or three hours for a visit that also includes the Scogliera del Monte, the Caracciolo Ramp and the military shrine. 83 hectares can't be exhausted in a single visit.

Can you take photographs at the Verano Cemetery?

Photographs for personal use are generally allowed, as long as you don't photograph visitors and don't disturb ceremonies in progress. For professional shoots, crews, bulky tripods or drones, authorization from the management is needed, to be requested in advance.

How do you get to the Verano Cemetery by public transport?

Bus 71 from Tiburtina station, stopping at Piazzale del Verano. Trams 3 and 19 stopping at Verano along the Porta Maggiore and Valle Giulia line, bearing in mind that the Roman tram network is affected by construction work and some stretches are served by replacement buses. By metro, line B to Policlinico or Tiburtina and then a quarter of an hour on foot.

Is there parking at the Verano Cemetery?

There is a parking area on the square, insufficient on the busiest days and practically inaccessible around November 2. In the neighborhood street parking is difficult. The practical advice is to arrive by public transport.

Is the Verano Cemetery wheelchair accessible?

Partially. The main avenues are asphalted and passable, and the internal shuttle helps a lot. The upper zones like the Pincetto and the Scogliera del Monte have staircases and uneven surfaces. For access with your own car, exceptions are provided for people with disabilities.

Is there an internal shuttle at the Verano Cemetery?

Yes, the managing body provides a free shuttle service that leaves from the main square and makes a loop with about 20 stops, from the morning until shortly before closing. Hours and rules vary over time and on anniversaries: ask at the gatehouse.

How do you find a person's tomb at the Verano Cemetery?

At the monumental entrance there is a search service: the staff query the register by first and last name and indicate zone, plot and avenue. It's the quickest and most reliable way, much more than the lists circulating online.

Which famous people are buried at the Verano Cemetery?

Among the many: Giuseppe Gioachino Belli, Trilussa, Giuseppe Ungaretti, Alberto Moravia, Natalia Ginzburg, Gianni Rodari, Giacomo Balla, Vittorio De Sica, Marcello Mastroianni, Alberto Sordi, Vittorio Gassman, Nino Manfredi, Monica Vitti, Gigi Proietti, Eduardo De Filippo, Ettore Petrolini, Ennio Morricone, Rino Gaetano, Gabriella Ferri, Pietro Nenni, Nilde Iotti, Giulio Andreotti, Errico Malatesta.

Is Goffredo Mameli's tomb really at the Verano Cemetery?

The funerary monument yes, and it's a work by Luciano Campisi inaugurated on July 26, 1891. The remains no: they were moved in 1941 to the Garibaldian Ossuary Mausoleum on the Janiculum.

Is Grazia Deledda buried at the Verano Cemetery?

She was, from 1936 to 1959. Then her remains were transferred to Nuoro, to the church of the Madonna della Solitudine, where they rest in a black granite sarcophagus.

Where is Trilussa's tomb at the Verano Cemetery?

On the Caracciolo Ramp, the 1918 work by Corrado Cianferoni, where the poet's tomb was placed in the 1950s.

What are the painted portraits you see on the tombs?

They are the enamels on lava by Filippo Severati, made with a technique patented in the 19th century and fired, which is why they are still vivid after more than a century outdoors. At the Verano about 250 can be counted, all signed, dated and numbered.

How big is the Verano Cemetery?

About 83 hectares, divided into 21 zones and served by nine entrances. It is the largest monumental cemetery in Rome and one of the largest in Europe.

Why is the Verano Cemetery called that?

From the name of the ancient field of the gens Verania, a senatorial family of the Republican age that owned those lands along Via Tiburtina.

Are there still cremations at the Verano Cemetery?

The Egyptian temple in zone XI hosted the first Roman crematorium furnace, lit in 1883, but that plant was decommissioned in 1980. The city's cremation service today operates at the Flaminio cemetery at Prima Porta.

What is the difference between the Verano Cemetery and the Non-Catholic Cemetery?

The Verano is the city's great municipal cemetery, born of the Napoleonic edict and grown to 83 hectares, with all denominations represented in separate sections. The Non-Catholic Cemetery, at the foot of the Pyramid of Cestius, is much smaller and older, born in the 18th century for non-Catholic foreigners, and keeps the tombs of Keats and Shelley. The first tells Rome, the second tells those who came to Rome from outside.

Can you visit the Verano Cemetery with a private guide?

Yes. Besides the free tours of the managing body it's possible to organize routes with licensed escorts and guides, a recommended solution for groups, schools and foreign visitors: TourLeaderPro handles professional accompaniment in Rome and coordinates this kind of itinerary.

Is the Verano Cemetery suitable for children?

Yes, if prepared. It works well with kids from eight years up, with a concrete observation goal and a prior explanation of the rules of behavior. It's not a place where you run and it's not a park.

What is there to see around the Verano Cemetery?

The Basilica of San Lorenzo fuori le mura, the San Lorenzo neighborhood, the University City with its museums, the stretch of Aurelian Walls between Porta Maggiore and Porta San Lorenzo and, a little further on, Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.

The Verano is the place in Rome I recommend to those who claim to have already seen everything. It asks for no ticket, no reservation, has no line, and contains more Italian sculpture of the 19th and 20th centuries than any museum in the city keeps. It asks only two things: good shoes and the awareness that you are walking in someone else's house. Go there on a winter morning, climb to the Pincetto, stop in front of one of those faces painted on lava stone and try to hold its gaze. Then tell me if it has ever happened to you anywhere else.

Article written by the editorial team of TourLeaderPro, contact them for Private/Corporate/V.I.P. Tours and Experiences.

Planning a trip to Rome? The English guides for visiting the city are on ItalyPlanner.com.