The history of the creation of a public cemetery began in Verona as for the other cities, because of Napoleonic rule. The decrees prohibited the practice of burying the dead in ancient churches. In 1804 the Municipality of Verona deliberated the creation of a cemetery outside the town, but the urgency of the moment was pushing to make use of already existing structures, at first the area near the church of the Holy Trinity where the Venetian soldiers fallen in the XVIIIth century were buried in mass graves, then by 1806 the cloisters of San Bernardino. Applying the revolutionary principles of egalitarianism and indifference to the fate of the body, the burial should be collective, closed to the piety of the living and subtracted to the Church’s care.

In 1817 Giuseppe Barbieri(1777-1838) was commissioned to design the new cemetery, professional and City’s Engineer. The numerous attempts to identify a suitable site for the new building were resolved in 1820 with the choice of facing the Victoria Door, along the Adige river. Here Barbieri realized since 1828 a four-sided enclosure in which the clarity of its strong urban system and, in direct relation with the center's capacity, reveal no dormant suggestions of the Jacobin utopian architecture, which is also appropriate for the severity. The greek doric order chosen for the forepart of the portico entrance and the interior porticoes. Linked to the climate of restoration of order and social hierarchy imposed by the Austrian domination and functional organization, where the open areas bounded by axial paths are destined for burial of the poor in the bare earth, the two sides welcome the loops burials of soldiers and children, while the tombs of most conspicuous families are designed to be in the arcaded wings, divided in two galleries by a central septum wall.

In the bays of the arcades are so again placed the personal and family tombs that the Napoleonic legislation had sought to eliminate. After the death of Barbieri in 1838 the cemetery was completed by Francesco Ronzani, and the sculptural apparatus, including veiled figures in the prospectus of the entrance, was largely carried out at the end of the XIXth century by Carlo and Attilio Spazzi. There are some notable burial sculptures of the late XIXth century, including: the eclectic monument Dolci (1895), by Ettore Ferrari, with the relief of a pompous procession of mourners girls going down to the urn of the deceased by the scale of a Gothic lodge in perspective, the top is decorated with faux Early Christian mosaic with Angels; the Bertani tomb, always of the Spazzi brothers, is dominated by the risen Christ in white marble, which descends from the dead, surmounted by a glory of bronze angels; Erbisti tomb (1880), by Ugo Zannoni, with the children who surround their dying mother; also by Ettore Ferrari, the Lugo monument (1898), in which a sore in white marble lies on the tomb draped in bronze, topped by an angel bearing an olive branch, the Poggi tomb, by D. Barcaglia (1890), with the allegorical group of Fortune that rewards hard work (motto: No Fortuna sed, labor)

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