Saudade Cemetery was opened to meet the demand for burial grounds in the city of Ribeirão Preto, which in those days was witnessing the boom promoted by the combination of coffee plantations and the railroad system. The cemetery was located in the district of Campos Elíseos that, at the time, was quite similar to the neighborhood of Brás in São Paulo’s capital, which was home to a large population of blue-collar workers in this part of the city. The cemetery layout followed the standard grid model adopted for sections aligned side by side and in sequence. In fact it resembles a miniature town with drive and pathways leading to a main building, which in this case is the chapel. This public venue is permeated with civic and religious elements.

Illustrious personalities buried at Saudade Cemetery include politicians such as Antonio Duarte Nogueira, Costábile Romano, Fábio de Sá Barreto, João Rodrigues Guião, Joaquim Camilo de Moraes Mattos, Orlando Jurca Condeixa Filho, and Veiga Miranda; the families Martins, Maciel, Delgado, Junqueira, Alves Ferreira, Penteado, and Lemos do Val, all of them linked to coffee plantations; successful traders such as those in the families Espinelli, Rocha and Biagi; artists and intellectuals, including Leonello Berti, Jirges Dieb Ristum, and Pedro Manuel Gismond; marble workers who built several of the local gravestones, such as Carlo Barberi, Antonio Roselli, João de Bortolli and Amleto Belloni. Religious folks may be interested to visit the tombs of Dom Aparício, Fr. José Alsemi and the Ursuline nuns.

There are also those tombs that have become places of pilgrimage, such as those of Menina Piedade, Menino Zezinho, and the image of Nossa Senhora da Cabeça [Our Lady of the Head]. The great majority of anonymous formers dwellers of Ribeirão Preto is buried in funerary niches arranged into tiers along the cemetery walls and decorated in singular manner by the relatives of the deceased who express their feelings artistically, in the popular style and taste.

This conventional and secularized cemetery clearly conveys the exaltation of death, the unbearable pain caused by the loss of loved ones, and the immortalization of the deceased by honoring them with memorial monuments. Saudade Cemetery is viewed as part of the Brazilian historical and cultural heritage, given the diversity of architectural and decorative styles that it houses. There is no doubt that the silent symbols omnipresent throughout the graveyard represent the taste, easily assimilated by the local population, for such styles as neo-classical, eclectic, realism, and art nouveau. The tombs built at the turn of the 20th century are decorated with cult images and ornaments that agree with people’s moral and religious background.

There is a prevailing attendance of Christian icons such as images of saints and angels. The artistic rendition of these decorative elements reveal the different periods of the city history, including the coffee boom and the well-to-do coffee planters; the several economic crises, as for example that of 1929; the smallpox and yellow fever epidemics; the sugarcane and agribusiness cycle, and many others that express the difference in social strata within a same graveyard replete with memories. In turn, the decoration of modern grave markers also evoke the heartfelt and significant feelings that so contributed to construct the “collective unconscious” of the Ribeirão Preto society. Despite the state of demolition and abandonment of some tombs, a number of important monuments may still be appreciated from the points of view of architecture, history and tourist interest, thus substantially increasing the attractiveness of a visit to Saudade Cemetery.

• ABDALA, Amir. Da Dramatização ao silencio Social: as dimensões culturais da morte em Ribeirão Preto. Mestrado em Historia Social, São Paulo: Pontifícia Universidade Católica, 2000.
• ARAÚJO, Marla Muscellide. Turismo Cemiterial: a Necrópole da saudade em Ribeirão Preto . [Monografia]. Ribeirão Preto: Centro Universitário Moura Lacerda, 2004.
• BORGES, Maria Elizia. Arte funerária no Brasil (1890-1930) ofício de marmoristas italianos de Ribeirão Preto = Funerary Art in Brazil (1890-1930): italian marble carver craft in Ribeiro Preto. Belo Horizonte: editora C/ Arte, 2002.
• REGISTRO, Tânia Cristina. O Cemitério da Saudade de Ribeirão Preto. [Monografia]. Franca: UNESP, 1994.