It is the fourth and last building of the Piazza dei Miracoli, the one nobody looks at because the Tower is on the other side, and for the nineteenth-century traveller it was the first. The Camposanto is a Gothic cloister as long as a city block, closed by a blind wall of forty-three arches, begun in 1277 by Giovanni di Simone to gather the tombs that crowded around the cathedral and finished only in 1464. Legend has it that inside lies soil from Golgotha, brought back on Pisan ships from the Crusade by Archbishop Ubaldo Lanfranchi: hence the name, Campo Santo, holy field, which went on to name every cemetery in Italy.
What to see
The walls of the galleries were covered with more than two thousand six hundred square metres of frescoes, more than the Sistine Chapel. The most famous cycle is Buonamico Buffalmacco's, painted in the years of the Black Death: the Triumph of Death, with the horsemen holding their noses before the open coffins, the Last Judgement, Hell and the Thebaid of the hermits. In the north gallery Benozzo Gozzoli painted the stories of the Old Testament in the fifteenth century; Taddeo Gaddi, Spinello Aretino, Antonio Veneziano and Piero di Puccio the rest. Along the walls, the Roman sarcophagi reused in the Middle Ages for noble burials, and the tombs of the University's professors: the Camposanto was Pisa's pantheon.
On 27 July 1944 a shell fragment set the roof on fire; the molten lead ran down over the frescoes and ruined almost all of them. Detaching them to save them revealed the sinopie, the preparatory drawings beneath the plaster, today in the Museo delle Sinopie on the other side of the square. The restoration took seventy years: the Triumph of Death returned to its place on 7 April 2018, with a system of sensors in the wall that governs the temperature to prevent condensation.
Visiting
The Camposanto is visited with the combined ticket for the monuments of the square; the entrance is the right-hand portal, beneath the Gothic tabernacle with the Madonna. The three chapels, Ammannati, Aulla and Dal Pozzo, keep among other things the lamp that, according to tradition, Galileo watched swinging in the cathedral. The Dal Pozzo chapel holds the relics of the cathedral.
Our editors' tip
Go to the Museo delle Sinopie before entering, and carry Buffalmacco's red lines inside with you: in front of the Triumph of Death you will understand how much was lost in the fire and how much was saved. Then stop on the central lawn in silence, with the arcades all around: it is still a cemetery, and the square outside seems very far away.