Matters of grave import in Genoa

Genoa is a tough town, and proud of it. If you want sweet airs and artistic graces, go to Florence (outside the tourist season, which allows you about two mid-weeks in February); if it's the majestic weariness of history you are after, then Rome is your place; Milan is fashion, Trieste is melancholy, Bologna is the best cuisine. But for a picture of Italy at its most hard-headed, vigorous and adventurous, you must take a look at Genoa.

The first city of the province of Liguria, that ribbon of rocky coastline and mountainous hinterlands that runs from the French border to the north-west edge of Tuscany, Genoa is still one of the chief ports of the Mediterranean, though not as powerful as it was in the 14th century, when it was strong enough to challenge the hegemony of Venice. That challenge was finally rebuffed at the battle of Chioggia in 1380, but Genoa's days of glory continued well into the 17th century. The city's proudest boast is that it is the birthplace of Christopher Columbus. Down in the ancient part of the city, huddled like the tiers of an amphitheatre around the old port, where more than half the population is comprised of immigrants, many of them from North Africa, one can still sense the yearning for far-off places that sent the city's most famous son off in search of the Indies.

To climb up through these impossibly narrow streets, the carugi, some of them no more than three metres wide, under the beetling palazzi that stand almost forehead to forehead on either side, surrounded by striding black figures in billowing white djellabas, amid aromas of incense and roasting lamb and hashish - surely that was hashish? - is to experience an extraordinarily immediate, thrilling and unsettling sense of the Orient.

Another source of defiant pride to the Genovese is the stupendously ugly yet irresistibly endearing elevated motorway that runs between the old town and the port like an enormous loop of broken spring. In the 1980s, the architect Renzo Piano was given the task of redesigning and revitalising the port area, with . . . well, let us say, with mixed success.

Since the quincentenary Columbus celebrations of 1992, however, a vigorous campaign of restoration has been carried on by the city authorities, with results visible not only on the grand scale of, for instance, the Palazzo Ducale and the Palazzo di San Giorgio, but also in the most unexpected little corners: as one is crossing a deserted piazzetta, an upward glimpse reveals suddenly through a high open doorway a lovingly-restored fragment of ceiling with flying gods, gesturing saints and suspended, pink-bottomed putti. New buildings have gone up as well, such as the Carlo Felice opera house (Aldo Rossi, 1987-91), where not only the stage but the auditorium itself is designed as a stage set, with balconies and little curtained windows ranged along the sides, so that, as the action continues on stage, one constantly expects to catch from the corner of the eye the heroine's lost twin brother's best friend the Duke popping out his head at a finestra to sob of thwarted love and insulted honour and bloodhot revenge.

A vigorous, vibrant city, then, filled with the bustle and commotion of life. A shortish bus ride from the centre, however, leads to another Genoa, where the dead reign in lugubrious, sepulchral silence. Staglieno Cemetery, on a hillside to the north-east, above the Bisagno valley, was laid out, "with extensive gardens", as the guide book has it, in the middle of the 19th century. It is a vast quadrilateral traversed by pathways in the shape of a cross, with an imposing, triple-vaulted entranceway, and four long lengths of double arcades in the walls of which are entombed a century and a half of the city's glorious and not so glorious dead. For the connoisseur of Europe's grandest graveyards, Staglieno must be the ultimate in extravagance, outrageousness, and mortal gaiety.

The cemetery holds some famous graves, including that of the Risorgimento leader Giuseppe Mazzini ("Death does not exist. It cannot even be conceived. Life is life, it is immortality" - no wonder he could stir the crowds), and, in the Protestant section, Constance Lloyd, the wife of Oscar Wilde (Wilde's name is carved in the largest lettering on the headstone, which no doubt would have pleased him).

There is also the English Cemetery, where the slain British soldiery of two world wars are buried. What makes this place most special, however, is the profusion of its statuary. The little guide brochure one is given at the gate is admirably candid, if a shade imprecise in its wording:

Made up of a great number of monuments and funeral chapels, the cemetery illustrates the taste of architects and sculptors in Liguria from the second half of the nineteenth century until today. Speaking from a strictly artistic standpoint there are few masterpieces, but they provide a unique record of historical detail making the Staglieno Cemetery one of the most imposing achievements in this style.

Along the inner arcades are set scenes of life-sized, frozen grief. Here are whole families carved in stone, down to pet dogs and favourite dolls, all cloaked in a ghostly chiaroscuro built up from generations of the city's grime. Generously-curved and scantily-clad young women abound, some attended by muscled he-men, as for instance Maria Francesca Delmas, by Gigi Orengo (1909), who reclines in the lap of a particularly splendid specimen of Italian manhood - can there be toy-boys in the afterlife?

The tomb of Lina Scorza, by Eduardo De Albertis, depicts the lost lady being supported by two leggy lovelies in a scene suggestive of the Three Graces, and which could easily have been transported here from the island of Lesbos. Most startling of all, however, is the tomb of one Luigi Burlando, a chemist, over which is draped a full-sized carving of the meltingly voluptuous body of a young woman rumoured to have been the lucky Signor Burlando's mistress. So explicit is the representation that the cemetery authorities keep adding strategically placed shields for the girl's modesty - a bunch of plaster roses, a drape of plaster cloth - which in their turn keep being worn away by the prurient rain and winds.

The most famous of the statues, and the most touching, is that of the old flower seller Teresa Campodonico. It was Teresa's greatest desire to have herself commemorated in the Staglieno, and to that end she saved up her pennies from her youth onward. When she died, every memorial sculptor in the city competed for the commission, for Teresa's fame was already wide, and all knew that whoever got the job of making her statue would be assured of rich commissions for life. The result is not one of the guide book's "few masterpieces", but it has its grim and touching charm, and no doubt Teresa is proud as punch, wherever she is.

The Italians prize their dead. Indeed, they seem, like their hero Mazzini, bent on denying the reality of death. One warm day last spring, with the smell of corpses "distinctly perceptible," as Beckett's narrator in First Love delicately puts it, "under those of grass and humus mingled", as we strolled through the vast quiet of Staglieno's yew glades, we came upon a family, peaceable and grave, seated in the grass beside the tomb of what was no doubt one of their loved ones, enjoying a picnic. There was bread and wine, and funeral baked meats, and before they left there would perhaps be a libation, just as in ancient days. In the midst of death, we are in life.

John Banville's new novel, Eclipse, will be published by Picador on September 22nd. Price £15.99 in UK.