Not all travel has to be about the good times. Steve Bonello finds a lot to attract him at Staglieno, Genoa’s cemetery made famous by UK postpunk band Joy Division.

La Superba – the proud one as Genoa was once called – is not among Italy’s most visited places and remains mostly off the tourist radar. This is a good thing, really. For starters, you can get good accommodation at half the price you’ll pay in the more popular art cities and it also means you don’t normally have to book much in advance either.

The city is not immediately likeable perhaps. Its Piano-designed waterfront is marred by the weighty presence of the Sopraelevata – a 1960s motorway on stilts that cuts rudely through the town’s port area – brooding over this newest attraction to the city.

Rugged round the edges it may be, but delve into the narrow streets immediately off the front and you’ll discover another Genoa – one of impossibly narrow streets, huge palazzi tottering over the smallest of piazzas, and a wealth of bonhomie otherwise almost absent in the larger tourist magnets. It’s the closest thing to an Arab medina this side of the Mediterranean and, quite rightly, it’s a Unesco World Heritage Site too.

Genoa also makes for a great springboard to see some of Liguria’s highlights: the incredibly pretty seaside town of Camogli, the celebrated villages and walking trails of the Cinque Terre and the unlikely monastery-with-beach hideaway of San Fruttuoso can all be visited on day trips out of town. But here’s a little confession. I love cemeteries and Genoa (before going there at least) meant only one thing to me – Staglieno.

The Appointed Hour.

Now most people will avoid cemeteries, unless that close family funeral requires them to accompany the deceased to their final resting place. This is understandable, of course, but I tend to think differently. Cemeteries are a salutary reminder of our fragility and inevitable mortality – a healthy reality check. Better still, the best ones can easily be described as exquisite sculpture gardens; an insight into a side of human culture that dates back from time immemorial.

The de rigueur place to be seen dead in and an attraction in its own right

Staglieno is not just another cemetery – at over one square kilometre in size, it is one of the largest in Europe and often touted as the world’s most beautiful. It is one of a series of huge Italian monumental cemeteries that came about following Napoleon’s Edict of Saint-Cloud from 1804, which prohibited burials in churches and towns.

Following the 1835 cholera epidemic that hit the city, plans for the cemetery were finalised and it finally opened in 1851. Designed by the noted Genoese architect Carlo Barabino, Staglieno was laid out with intentional grandiosity in the Neo-Classical style popular at the time. Soon after it opened, it became the de rigueur place to be seen dead in and an attraction in its own right. Mark Twain praised the cemetery in his Innocents Abroad, and Freidrich Nietzsche was a frequent visitor.

The family tomb that featured on the cover of the album Closer.

The Angel of Resurrection.

So on a warm September morning I set out to visit Staglieno. The bus from near the Piazza Principe train station winds its way up the city’s numerous hills and, in 20 minutes, I’m there. I step out of the living metropolis and - metaphorically at least – briefly out of this world.

Apparently, I am the only tourist among the few visitors around and an elderly guide who spots my camera offers his services which I politely decline. I have done my research well and have a good idea what I want to see. Or so I think.

But I am still overwhelmed. The amount of superb funerary sculptures along the endless colonnaded arcades is huge. There are friezes depicting grieving families by deathbeds, hooded figures and angels aplenty; one angel frozen in the act of writing the deceased’s death date. All depicted realistically, way too realistically. The themes vary from the ones oozing pathos to the unintentionally grotesque bordering on Hollywood horror.

The disconsolate sprawled angel of the Ribaudo family tomb was used as an alternative cover for the band’s best-known single, Love Will Tear Us Apart

I get my bearings and head for two particular graves – the ones that initially made me aware of this place in fact. Long ago, as an angry young man I was gobsmacked when I first heard the British post punk band Joy Division and was equally impressed by the band’s cover artworks.

Two of these featured monuments from Staglieno. The band’s second album, Closer, features the Appiani family tomb – a classic grieving composition if ever there was one. Some distance away is the disconsolate sprawled angel of the Ribaudo family tomb, used as an alternative cover for the band’s best-known single Love Will Tear Us Apart.

Satisfied with my mini Joy Division pilgrimage tour I wander further and find most of the notable sculptures I am looking for. There’s the lovely Angel of Resurrection by Giulio Monteverde, perhaps the cemetery’s most sensual piece – copied in a multitude of cemeteries all over the world; there are even a few (bad) copies in our own Addolorata. Monteverde is also responsible for arguably Staglieno’s weirdest piece – the Valente Celle tomb. This sculpture represents a veritable danse macabre; a beautiful young woman personifying life about to surrender to a shrouded spectre who has her firmly in his bony clutches. This is the stuff of nightmares.

A few well-known figures are buried in Staglieno. Oscar Wilde’s wife Constance Lloyd rests here as does the prominent figure of the Italian Risorgimento Giuseppe Mazzini. One of Genoa’s best loved sons, the singer-songwriter Fabrizio de André is buried here, with his guitar seemingly watching over him. Ten thousand fans attended his funeral in 1999.

But, curiously, one of the best-loved monuments in the cemetery belongs to a relative nobody. Caterina Campodonico was a simple nut seller and must obviously have been caught in the personalised grave craze of the time. While still alive she commissioned and sat for her life-size portrait in the traditional garb of the street seller – complete with a garland made of the stuff of her trade: nuts, loaves and doughnuts.

Despite my best efforts I am simply unable to locate this touching monument, but it’s probably a good enough excuse to return to the place one day – armed with a better camera.

The warm morning clouds over and turns into a muggily humid noon. Soon enough a light drizzle starts to fall. My energy is sapped and slowly the decay of the place starts to get to me. The grime and dust covered statuary which no one bothers to clean, the rusting iron grilles everywhere finally make me conscious that I am in the land of the dead. I take the bus back to central Genoa pondering on life, death and a lot of beautiful things in between.