Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 23 April 1885 — The Campo Santo, or Cemetery, of Genoa. [ARTICLE]

The Campo Santo, or Cemetery, of Genoa.

The Campo Santo is about a mile and a half from the city, and is built in the form of a vast square court, with tombs of the rich in raised galleries on the four sides, and the graves of the poor in the flat ground in the middle. All the galleries are built of white marble, with roofs and long lines of pillars; and the tombs are generally placed along the inner side of the galleries, and the greater part of them are surmounted by groups of life-size statuary. It is these statues, all of them tile work of famous modern Italian sculptors, which give to the place its queer and peculiar character. Many of the groups- consist not only of statues of the persons buried in the tombs, but life-like figures of the surviving relatives dressed in modern clothes. In one place you will see a father on his death-bed, his wife, dressed in the fashion of the present day, sitting by his side, while his son, a young man in double-breasted sack coat and striped trousers, and a daughter, with a polonaise and pleated skirt, stand at the foot of the couch. These figures are so well done that they almost seem to be alive; and as the members of the family come year after year to the cemetery, they must be content to see the clothes they were sculptured in getting more and more old-fashioned. Some of the designs are fine and artistic, although to our ideas very strange. In one part of the grounds we perceive a young lady richly* attired in a dress with a long train trimmed with a double row of ruffles and lace, and wearing a cape edged with scalloped lace, kneelnig at the foot of her father’s tomb, while a grand and beautiful figure of Christ rises out of some clouds just in front of her, and with one hand over the recumbent statue of her dead father, and one over her head, offers her consolation. In another place there is a group of two sisters, who are kneeling by the door of the tomb of a third sister; the door of the tomb is partly open, and the bmiedf sisterj in company with an angel who holds her by the hand, has just come out of it, and is rising toward the sky; as these figures are life size, the effects very striking. Close to this tomb is one which is planned upon an entirely different idea; a large old angel with a long beard and very grim and severe countenance is sitting solemnly upon a closed tomb. His expression gives one the idea that he has looked zround upon the young lady who has been liberated by the angel, and that he has said to himself: “The person in the tomb on which I am sitting need not expect to get out until the proper time .comes.” There is do doubt that these groups are considered very appropriate monuments to deceased friends and relatives by those who have placed them there, but some of them cannot fail to strike Americans as strange and odd.— Frank IL Stockton, in St. Nicholas.