“ Its called the Campo Santo because therein is conserved the Holy Earth brought from Hierusalem in fifty Gallies of this Republic. These Gallies were sent by … Pisa to succour the Emperor Ænobarbe …. and they returned home again laden with the earth of the Holy Land, of which they made this Campo Santo. ”
Voyage of Italy, 229. Richard Lassels Gent. 1670.
The exterior simplicity of the Campo Santo, the pride of Pisa, enhances the wonderful beauty of the interior.
No people ever had a happier inspiration than the Pisans when they prepared this cloistered garden for their dead.
Within these dignified white walls, amid the painted presentments of life, of love, of judgment and dismay, kingly death may fitly hold his court.
Here he puts on no semblance of grisly horror, but is rather great and beneficent. The echoing steps of those who pass round the broad ambulatory hardly seem to break the extraordinary sense of peace that reigns in the little enclosure. In that sense too it is a fit abode of death, for life seems so infinitely far away from it.
It is a monument, not only to the energy, but to the imagination of the old Pisans.
Surely, they urged, there lies a magic virtue in the soil of that Holy Hill where the Redeemer accomplished His great sacrifice. And they resolved that the Pisan dead should share its benefits, and with infinite patience and diligence they conveyed to the coast enough of the sacred soil to fill a fleet of fiftythree galleys so that they rode deep in the water.
Then they sailed home triumphantly, Archbishop Ubaldo Lanfranchi being assured in his heart that, though his mission to Saladin had failed, he was bringing his countrymen something more precious than political success.
His was the moving spirit in this enterprise,
“ who out of the love he bore to his city determined to erect a cemetery the like of which was not in the world. He caused enough Holy Earth to be brought from Mount Calvary to cover the whole space. Some of this earth had been taken to Rome before, when it was found that in three days corpses buried therein were entirely consumed, which is a most marvellous thing. It is believed to have this virtue because Our Lord suffered at the place from which it was taken. This is why the cemetery was called Il Campo Santo, or the Holy Field. ”
So wrote an old chronicler, and Tronci (Annali Pisani, 61-62) adds that
“ it was made near the Duomo at such great expense and with such magnificence, that for the burial of the dead I do not believe there is such a sumptuous fabric in all the world, or one so much admired by all who see it. I have heard the old men of the city say that before the fleet with its load entered into Pisa it put in near the church of S. Giovanni al Gaetano on the banks of the Arno, and that either at the prayer of the Gaetani, its patrons, or by the good-will of the captain, many baskets-full of the said earth were carried ashore and set down outside the door of the church. I have heard too that this spot, which though narrow still serves as a burial place, shares in the miraculous properties of the earth of the Campo Santo. ”
( From the book “The Story of Pisa” by Janet Ross and Nelly Erichsen – Illustrade by Nelly Erichsen – London : J.M. Dent & Co, Aldine House, 29 and 30 Bedfod Street Covent Garden, W.C. – 1909 )
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So much love and respect for their deceased. Honourable. I salute them!
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