Italian monumental sculpture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is among the most remarkable sculpture ever made, and quite extraordinarily little known. Mainly produced for funerary and commemorative purposes, in the new cemeteries that were constructed all over the secularized Italian state, the sculpture developed from relatively conventional neoclassicism through ever more astonishing forms of realism, informed in turn by art nouveau and by art deco. Expensive to a degree that astonishes even today, the emotional charge of this sometimes symbolic but more commonly hyper-realistic, often erotic and always arresting work is caught in this collection of specially taken photographs, while the scholarly texts analyse the iconographic, cultural and art historical background to the works.