Monumental Cemetery of Pisa

This guide to the Monumental Cemetery of Pisa opens with a stray bomb from an Allied air raid on the twenty-seventh of July, nineteen forty-four, that struck the roof over this cloister and rained molten lead onto centuries of frescoes, including the Triumph of Death painted here in the thirteen thirties. It also tells of the ground itself, said to hold soil shipped home from Golgotha after the Fourth Crusade, and of architect Giovanni di Simone, who died before the arcades around it were finished. Restorers spent decades afterward peeling surviving fragments off the scorched plaster. Look closely at the wall for traces of that damage still visible today.