The Monumental Cemetery of Sant'Anna is the main cemetery of Trieste, founded in 1825 in what was then a peripheral area of the city. Before its establishment, the deceased were buried around the Cathedral of San Giusto, with bones periodically collected in the crypt of San Michele al carnale.
The site was chosen because a small chapel dedicated to Sant'Anna, mother of the Virgin Mary according to Christian tradition, stood there. The foundation was part of a broader nineteenth-century reorganization promoted by the Habsburg administration, aimed at eliminating the old city cemeteries and concentrating them in the Sant'Anna suburb, divided strictly by religious confession.
Architecture
The original layout featured a monumental entrance in Tuscan style, designed by the neoclassical architect Matteo Pertsch — the same author of the Old Stock Exchange and many emblematic buildings of Habsburg Trieste. The cemetery complex houses a large number of funerary statues and monuments created by renowned artists, including sculptors Franco Asco and Marcello Mascherini, becoming over time a true open-air museum of nineteenth and twentieth-century sculpture.
The Multiethnic Trieste
The Sant'Anna complex encloses within it — separate but adjacent — the cemeteries of the main confessional communities present in Habsburg Trieste: Catholic, Greek-Orthodox, Serbian-Orthodox, Jewish, and Evangelical. This spatial coexistence is the most concrete testimony of the extraordinary ethnic and religious plurality that characterized the free port of the Empire.