A large complex originally founded as a Carthusian monastery, the Certosa Charterhouse was built between 1452 and 1461 by Borso d’Este, based on the designs of Brasavola. According to Carthusian traditions, at that time it was isolated and far from the city walls, which did not extend beyond Corso Giovecca. The Napoleonic suppression of monasteries forced the monks to leave, allowing the buildings to be repurposed as military barracks. In 1813, Ferdinando Canonici designed the transformation of the then-abandoned monastery, turning it into the local cemetery. His plan created harmonious balance between the existing fifteenth-century complex, the Church of San Cristoforo and its open spaces through large, curved porticoed walkways in marble and terracotta that extend from the sides of the church to delimit the gardens that welcome visitors, and through new cloisters.

Today, the Certosa Charterhouse covers more than 12 hectares of land and, as indicated by Carlo Bassi, its cemetery includes an ample collection of Italian statues, from Neoclassicism up to the 20^th century, and is the final resting place of important figures.

The earthquake that struck Emilia in 2012 gravely damaged the Church of San Cristoforo, resulting in its closure to the public, like many other monumental areas. Restoration work is ongoing.

One prominent literary portrait of this place stands out among the pages of one of the tales in Five Stories of Ferrara: ‘Clelia Trotti's Last Days’. It is there that, more than in his other works, the eye and the pen of the writer linger in the spaces of the Certosa cemetery, in a descriptive diversion that captures its intimate, suspended atmosphere.

‘Even the arrival to this place conveys its poetic surroundings: remote, but just a stone's throw from life and traffic, psychologically experienced as if extra muros, but within the city walls, in the cultivated countryside, at the edge of the built environment of the Erculean Addition.’

(C. Bassi, Perché Ferrara è Bella. Guida alla Comprensione della città, Gabriele Corbo Editore, Ferrara 1994, p. 139)

‘Napoleonic law ensured that, for health reasons, burials took place within gated places “outside” the city. Ferrara had an entire quadrant of the Erculean Addition that was still out in the countryside, even if the area (which is still a grove and orchard) was within the Renaissance city walls.

That made it possible for the laws of the Napoleonic state to be “interpreted” and Ferrara, unique or almost unique among Italian cities, found itself with an intra moenia cemetery’.

(C. Bassi, Ferrara Patrimonio dell’Umanità. UNESCO statement , 8 December 1995. Guida alla Storia, ai Monumenti, ai Percorsi con Qualche Ragionamento, Gabriele Corbo Editore, Ferrara 1996, p. 51)

To call the vast, architectonic complex of Ferrara’s Municipal Cemetery beautiful, so beautiful as even to be consolatory, there’d be the risk, even among us, of provoking the usual sniggers, the superstitious gestures to fend off the evil eye always at the ready in Italy to greet any speech that refers to death without deploring it. All the same, once you arrive at the end of Via Borso d’Este, a perfectly straight little road, with the marble-cutting workshops huddled at the start and the florists at the end, and entirely overwhelmed by the thick foliage of the two big private parks on either side, the unexpected vista of the Piazza della Certosa and of the adjacent cemetery, gives, there’s no use denying it, a joyful, almost festive impression.

To have an idea of what the Piazza della Certosa is like, one should think of an open, nearly empty meadow, scattered as it is in the distance with some occasional funerary monuments for illustrious nineteenth-century lay-persons: a kind of parade ground, in short. To the right, the rugged, unfinished façade of the church of San Cristoforo, and also, curving in a wide semi-circle until it reaches the city walls, a red, early-sixteenth-century portico on which some afternoons the sun beats down to magnificent effect; to the left, only small, semi-rustic houses, only the low boundary walls of the big vegetable gardens and orchards of which even now in this most northerly zone of the city there is an abundance, houses and low walls which, in contrast to the opposite side, do not offer the least obstacle to the long rays of afternoon or evening sunlight. In the space between these boundaries there’s very little, I repeat, that speaks of death. ...It may be because of the dreamy sweetness of the place, and also, it should be said, its almost perfect and perpetual solitude, but the fact is that the Piazza della Certosa has always been the favourite site for lovers’ trysts. ....a custom that has been established of old, a kind of ritual... It was in force before the war, as it is today and will be tomorrow. True, the bell tower of San Cristoforo, docked halfway up by an English grenade in April 1945 and remaining thus, a sort of bloody stump, is there to declare that any guarantee of permanence is illusory, and therefore that the message of hope that the sunlit porticoes with their reddened heat seem to express is only a lie, a trick, a beautiful deception. ...Even this will come to an end sooner or later.

(G. Bassani, ‘Clelia Trotti's Last Days’, in The Novel of Ferrara, translated by Jamie McKendrick, Penguin Classics, 2018, e-book version, location 1567-1592)