ABSTRACT
Within nineteenth-century Italy, cemeteries were invested with considerable political significance. In fact, politics had a greater influence than either religion or attitudes to death on the development of Italian funerary architecture, and the degree of attention awarded to Italy's monumental cemeteries testified to their political importance with respect to the city and society. Although the political use of commemoration was nothing new, its employment during the Risorgimento differed, for instance, from the manner in which the Napoleonic regime honoured anonymous heroes to bolster an ideology that was less dependent on consensus. Italian cemeteries gained political significance as projects that reflected both changes in leadership and an underlying instability that was widespread during the 1800s. The monumental cemeteries reflected both the unifying forces of nationalism and a long-standing tradition of local patriotism, or campanilismo, which was deeply entrenched in Italian communities.
