The Camposanto

The famous ruined frescoes and ancient sculptures inside Pisa's holy burial ground

The north end of the Field of Miracles is bounded by a long wall of Gothic marble.

Sunbathers lie on the grass before it, few venturing through the doorway halfway along that quietly heralds the Camposanto, a sight sadly overlooked by most Pisa visitors.

Pity. They are missing one of the city's true highlights.

Pisa's Camposanto is a kind of cloister-cum-mausoleum. Its long interior corridors are stuffed with ancient sarcophagi and Renaissance tombs, separated from the grassy central courtyard by delicate Gothic three-light windows.

Its name—Camposanto means "Holy Ground"—comes from the fact that the soil at its center was carted here from Golgotha (a.k.a. Calvary), the hill in Jerusalem atop which jesus is said to have been crucified, making burial here a sacred act.

The sad, true story of the Camposanto frescoes

The corridors of Pisa's Camposanto are lined by Roman sarcophagi and the remains of medieval frescoesPisa's Camposanto used to be world-renowned for its cycle of medieval and early Renaissance frescoes by the likes of Benozzi Gozzoli. It was ranked right up there with the Basilica of St. Francis in Assisi and the Sistine Chapel in Rome. No joke.

When Allied firebombs in World War II rained down on Pisa, they not only took out the Camposanto roof, but also melted its lead tiles.

The destruction of the Camposanto during World War IIThe molten lead ran straight down the interior walls, in the process destroying many of the famous and dazzling medieval frescoes that once covered the Camposanto's corridors.

Most of the frescoes the bombs didn't outright destroy were left so highly ruinous it has taken decades to coax anything of the original images out of the salvaged sheets of plaster.

Restorers have slowly and painstaking been restored these as best they can and reattaching them to the walls—and, damaged and piecemeal though they are, with faded colors and large chunks missing, they are still stupendous.

This detail from The Triumph of Death show souls (symbolized by infants) being drawn from the mouths of the dead—some by angels to ascend to Heaven; others by demons to be dragged down to Hell. Awesome.(To get a sense of what they looked like in their prime, visit the Museo del Duomo to see a series of 19th century etchings of the lost frescoes.)

The few frescoes that actually survived more or less intact—including the macabre and fascinating ★ Triumph of Death—are on display in a side room.

Make sure you also visit the Museo delle Sinopie across the piazza, where the detached preparatory sketches for the frescoes (discovered on the rough layer of plaster underneath the ruined frescoes) are preserved alongside reproductions of etchings showing what the finished frescoes once looked like.

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