Feedback Porte Sante cemetery
I went there as planned on October 18... to find out it was closed due to a strike (
sciopero in Italian).
Tried again next day with more luck.
The old map at the cemetery entry point shows the
Lorenzini mausoleum, which, as you noticed too, is not worth bothering anymore - it's the only one in a row of identical mausoleums where you can't see anything inside as it has been curtained off.
The only spot at the cemetery I could pinpoint precisely from information on the Web before I went there was the big mausoleum allegedly done in pre-columbian style for the
Fenci family (1906) : the lazy lions in front are very interesting. This is not 'pre-columbian style' as descriptions of people on the Web claim it to be, but simply
Art Deco (or
Art Nouveau) style.
A modern statue of a heavily-deformed
Christ figure for Alpo Carlo Benelli cannot be overlooked.
And the nameless
young couple standing on their tomb was obviously easy to spot.
The most bizarre discovery I made was the tomb of a one-year old child (
Maria Elisabetta Giustini, 1955-1956) for which some anonymous artist made a strange-looking sculpture of the wrapped child... with a large octopus stuck onto her body, which I nicknamed
Octopussy. I wonder why!
Another weird-looking place around an open courtyard was a covered
multistory (stacked) block of identical tombs - for caskets, not a columbarium - with many identical little lights still burning. There was a specially-made mobile ladder to reach (for the graveyard workers) the upper levels.
And finally, the pretentious-looking tomb for Italian politician
Giovanni Spadolini was also easy to see - there's a small Italian flag in the grass standing besides it.
I wasn't expecting to find the grave of cosmic rays pioneer physicist and Manhattan Project participant
Bruno Benedetto Rossi (this one isn't even in the Wikipedia tomb list), and I didn't.
Nor did I find the 19th century mausoleum for the
Vespucci family - the old chapel with
Amerigo in it at the
Ognissanti church was already on my wishlist anyway and was easy to find there.
I bundled all of the aformentioned spots into a single KMZ file, valid for the current
Google Earth imagery dated August 5, 2012 :
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/52458256/Cemetery_of_the_Holy_Doors_%28Florence%29.kmz
I hope someone finds this information useful.