Places of memory and silence

The cemeteries of Siena: where the city keeps its deepest secrets

Places visited on tiptoe

There are places that you visit on tiptoe. Places where the city slows down, lowers its voice, and safeguards a more intimate part of its history. The cemeteries of Siena belong to this dimension. Spaces of memory, contemplation, and reflection, where human value intertwines with historical, artistic, and civic heritage.
They are not merely places connected to the memory of those who have passed away, but also important testimonies of community life over time. Among chapels, funerary monuments, inscriptions, architecture, and paths immersed in silence, these spaces tell of the sensitivities, traditions, and transformations that have shaped the city and its generations.
Visiting places of memory means getting closer to a lesser-known Siena, more intimate and meditative. A Siena that does not impose itself through the monumentality of its most famous symbols, but allows itself to be understood through subtle traces, signs left over time, and individual stories that become collective memory.

In 1783, Grand Duke Peter Leopold of Lorraine mandated that burials be moved outside city churches and convents: a hygienic reform, certainly, but also a profound shift in how a city relates to its dead. From that turning point arose Siena's two main graveyards: the Laterino Cemetery, built first between 1784 and 1786 to a design by Bernardino Fantastici, and the Misericordia Cemetery, built between 1843 and 1866 outside Porta Tufi. Two places distinct in character, layout, and purpose, but united by a rare quality: preserving not only the dead, but their stories.

The Monumental Cemetery of Misericordia: an open-air museum

Outside Porta Tufi, the Monumental Cemetery of Misericordia unfolds as an extraordinary catalog of Sienese art between the 19th and 20th centuries. Its neoclassical layout, with a central obelisk and richly decorated family chapels, houses works by Giovanni Duprè, Tito Sarrocchi, Alessandro Franchi, Vico Consorti, and many other figures of Sienese sculpture and painting. The Pietà by Giovanni Duprè is considered one of the pinnacles of 19th-century Italian funerary sculpture: seeing it in person, in that silence with light filtering through the cypresses, is an unexpectedly profound experience.
The colonnades and chapels preserve frescoes and decorative cycles that document the taste and spirituality of an entire cultural era, ranging from Purism to Classicism, from Symbolism to Art Nouveau. Here lie members of prominent Sienese families, the Chigi Saracini, the Bandini Piccolomini, the Bichi Ruspoli Forteguerri, alongside monuments dedicated to those fallen in World War I and deceased contrada members: proof that this place is not merely a private commemoration, but the collective memory of an entire community, with its achievements, sorrows, and identity.

The Laterino cemetery: Siena's civic memory

The Laterino Cemetery is the oldest, most layered, and perhaps most surprising. The 18th-century wrought-iron gate at the entrance foretells what lies within: here, time carries a different, more everyday, and human weight. It is the cemetery of Siena's civic and patriotic memory: the Garibaldi Quadrangle gathers the graves of Sienese patriots who fought alongside Giuseppe Garibaldi, including the famous Baldovina Vestri and Giovanni Battista Fedolfi, among the last surviving Sienese Garibaldians into the 20th century. A corner of Risorgimento history preserved among cypresses, away from the clamor it rightfully deserves.

Yet Laterino is much more. It is where Federigo Tozzi rests, one of the most powerful and visionary voices of 20th-century Italian literature; where the great baritone Ettore Bastianini is buried, an internationally renowned artist whom Siena never stopped loving; where British art historian Robert Langton Douglas chose to remain, wishing to be laid to rest in this city he had come to cherish deeply. And also the famous art forger Icilio Federico Joni, painters, sculptors, and musicians: a gallery of extraordinary lives, scattered among the graves with the understated grace only truly authentic places possess.

Come walk among the stories

Slow down, step inside, and let yourself be surprised. The cemeteries of Siena do not demand tourist reverence: they ask for presence, curiosity, and the desire to read a name and wonder who that person was, what they left behind, and what they loved.

Misericordia Cemetery: outside Porta Tufi, Siena.

Laterino Cemetery: outside Porta Laterina, Siena.