It is of course the most famous monument, the one which is imprinted in the collective memory more than every other: the “peanut seller”’s grave, a quite popular character in town festivals and in traditional solemnities, who has commissioned her funerary monument and has paid for it with the money she has earned thanks to her untiring activity, while she was still alive. This sculpture, which was made in 1881, represents the peddler’s traits and traditional clothes; she wished to be represented with the objects she used to sell (necklaces made of hazelnuts, ring-shaped bread), with the same pride that has made entrepreneurs and professionals want to be pictured as surrounded by their actual symbols of their wealth and social status. It’s not at random that Caterina Campodonico wanted to be represented by Lorenzo Orengo, the sculptor who was held in the highest esteem by the Genoese bourgeoisie during the second half of the 19th century, thanks to his extraordinary technical ability to describe in details his commitments by representing their gestures and poses. The epigraph, which holds an inscription in Genoese dialect, which tells us Caterina’s whole story, has been made by the poet Giovanni Battista Vigo.
