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Episode 14

Why Do Italians Rent Their Graves?

In Italy nobody buys the ground under a grave. The town lends it for 99 years at most, a plain grave is dug up after 10, and forever ended in 1976.

9 November 202611 min readVideo 8:44

Italians rent their graves because in Italy nobody buys the ground under one. The town (the comune) lends the use of its cemetery land for a fixed term of 99 years at most, and a plain grave in the ground is usually dug up after 10 years so the plot can take someone new. Graves granted forever were ruled out by a 1975 decree, and many cemeteries are short of room, so every new grave granted since 1976 comes with an end date.

Watch the episode: Why Italians Rent Their Graves 8:44

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A stranger in her grave

In November 2026, a 43-year-old woman in Castellammare di Stabia, near Naples, went to visit the wall niche she had paid for years earlier. It held a stranger's body. The niche had been walled up with a new marble plaque for a woman born in 1938 who died on 4 December 2025. The owner hadn't visited for a year.

The carabinieri are investigating, coordinated by the Torre Annunziata prosecutor's office, and how the stranger got in isn't known yet. But whatever they find, there's an odd fact underneath the story: that grave was never really hers to keep.

Doesn't paying for a grave make it yours?

You'd think paying for a grave works like buying a flat. In Rho, near Milan, a new wall niche costs 5,000 euros in the 1st and 4th rows from the ground, and 6,000 in the 2nd and 3rd. Even in a cemetery wall, the middle rows cost extra. Then read the terms: it's a 40-year concession. In Rome in 2014, a funeral director quoted by Il Messaggero put a simple niche at 850 to 3,500 euros.

What you pay for is the use, not the land. Under Italy's mortuary regulation, DPR 285/1990, the comune can grant private people and bodies the use of cemetery areas to build graves, and those concessions are for a fixed term of no more than 99 years, renewable. A new niche, by a 1993 Ministry of Health circular, should preferably give at least 2.25 m by 75 cm by 70 cm of free space inside. A rented room in a wall.

What happens when the lease runs out?

In Naples, a burial costs over 400 euros, and at exhumation the family pays 120 euros more to move the remains into a niche. The dead pay a moving fee. So why do they need moving?

Because the cheapest grave doesn't last. National rules say ground burials are routinely exhumed after ten years, and the freed plots are used for new burials. Where the soil turns bodies to bone faster, the turn can be shortened with authorization, but never below five years.

The bones found at a routine exhumation go to the common ossuary, a shared room for bones, unless the family asks to place them in a niche it holds in concession. Remains that aren't fully bone yet may be cremated, where the comune can do it and the spouse or next of kin doesn't object; otherwise they're buried again.

A niche doesn't last either. When its concession runs out, the coffin is removed. In Ancona in 2023, the town published the list of 40-year niche concessions from 1983 that were expiring. Families had 6 months to renew, at the rates of the day. Remains nobody claims are boxed and kept for 2 years, then go to the common ossuary.

In Udine in 2026, the comune went looking for the heirs of about 100 people whose niche concessions had expired, with 30 days to renew, move the remains or authorize cremation. Otherwise the remains go to the common ossuary or are cremated. Renewing isn't always cheap: in 2024 Como added 15- and 30-year renewals for family tombs beside the 60-year one, because high prices sometimes put families off renewing at all.

Why is there no room?

Italy isn't short of land. Its cemeteries are short of room. It starts with Napoleon. His law of 23 Prairial year XII (12 June 1804) banned burials inside towns and created burial grounds outside them, with individual concessions for families. The edict's extension to the Kingdom of Italy is referenced in Ugo Foscolo's poem Dei Sepolcri, though Treccani says it wasn't the poem's main occasion. Italian law still calls a grave a concession today.

Two centuries on, Naples' cemetery city on the Poggioreale hill covers 502,510 square metres in 10 cemeteries, with 300 confraternity buildings and 6,448 private chapels. On 5 January 2022, two of those confraternity buildings partly collapsed, leaving remains exposed. And Italy recorded 650,587 deaths in 2024, by ISTAT's provisional count.

A Swiss high court put the problem plainly in 1999: without reuse, public cemeteries would take ever more land, or run out of room. And a town can't simply close a full cemetery and start fresh. If it does, families with a long or perpetual concession get a free equivalent place in the new one, but only for 99 years.

When a city runs short, the dead wait. In April 2021, Palermo had 870 coffins stacked under a tent at the Rotoli, its largest cemetery, some in storage for months and some for over a year. A city official had been arrested, accused of taking money to find burial places. That summer, nearly 1,000 coffins were waiting, and in the heat some burst. At the peak the storage rooms and tents held up to 1,600. The last coffin left storage on 23 June 2023.

So the room has to come from graves that come free. Rome's monumental Verano cemetery covers 800,000 square metres, about 110 football pitches. In 2014 it had 1,354 "free" tombs, from concessions that had expired or were expiring, were given up or never used, and Rome put 1,154 of them up for auction. You didn't even have to live near the cemetery to bid. In January 2015, the dearest lot, a 50 square metre chapel from 1920, sold for 683,000 euros, 33,000 over its starting price.

Is cremation the way out?

You'd think so. Ask a Greek family. Greek city cemeteries can't expand, and because the Church long opposed cremation, plots must be reused. Cremation has been legal in Greece since 2006, but it couldn't be carried out over the Orthodox Church's objection. The first crematorium only opened on 30 September 2019, at Ritsona, about 80 km north of Athens.

So families most often rent a plot for three years, sometimes five. Then the grave is opened. Bones that have fully turned to skeleton are cleaned, often with water and wine, blessed, placed in a small metal or marble box and stored in the cemetery's ossuary. The plot goes to the next family. In 2015, cremation campaigner Antonis Alakiotis put three years in a grave at around 2,500 to 3,000 euros. In 2019 he put keeping the bones in the cemetery at 40 to 100 euros a year.

Italy let cremation in. The Catholic Church has allowed a Christian funeral for people being cremated since 1963. Under 3% of Italy's dead were cremated in 1995. In 2024 it was 38.94%, up from 37.74% the year before. A 2001 law lets the ashes be placed in a niche, buried, or entrusted to the family, and scattered, if the deceased wished it, in set cemetery areas, in nature or on private land. A shelf at home charges no rent.

But that still leaves about 6 in 10 of Italy's dead needing a grave, so the walls keep filling. The obvious fix is more walls. One Sicilian city priced that, and found something cheaper: the graves it had granted forever.

Forever, until it isn't

Italy did grant graves forever. A royal decree of 1892 let a private grave be granted for a fixed term or in perpetuity. DPR 803/1975 ruled perpetual concessions out: they could be granted until 9 February 1976, and from the next day they were unlawful.

The ones granted before that should be safe. The Ministry of Health's view is that they are acquired rights and can't be revoked. But the 1990 regulation lets a town revoke old concessions granted for more than 99 years once 50 years have passed since the last burial, if its cemetery is seriously short of space. The Ministry says that rule covers only fixed-term grants. Some courts, including Sicily's administrative court, have applied it to perpetual ones too.

Trapani, in Sicily, ran short. In February 2025 about 70 coffins were in storage that couldn't be placed in a niche, with more to come, and its perpetual niche concessions number in the thousands. The alternative, three new pavilions with about 3,000 niches, would cost about 7 million euros, about 2,300 euros a niche. Taking back an old one costs a notice on a stone.

So on 14 February 2025, Trapani revoked 441 old concessions, perpetual ones included. Each list first needs clearance from a consultant on the history of Trapani's illustrious citizens. Presumably, the illustrious stay. The bottom row is spared too: those niches now lie under the road surface, and they aren't cleared.

Then the lists kept coming. In September 2025, graves of people who died between 17 June 1890 and 30 December 1924, with the notice posted on the gravestones themselves and removal starting 30 days after publication. In April 2026, 262 more. And in April 2025, police took measures against a former cemetery gravedigger, a worker and three funeral homes, accused of taking money for fast burials.

How long does a grave last elsewhere?

Italy isn't strange here. Plenty of places rent their graves, some for much less:

Where	How long a grave lasts
Greek cities	most often 3 years, sometimes 5
Hong Kong	a 6-year limit
Italy, ground graves	10 years (never under 5)
Madrid, municipal niche	10 years, extendable at any time
Singapore	15 years, since 1 November 1998
Berlin	at least 20 years
Hamburg (1998)	reused after 25 years
Italy, any concession	99 years at most
Berlin's Jewish cemeteries	permanent, for religious reasons

Singapore limits every grave to 15 years, then exhumes it, and announced the exhumation of 4,153 graves at Bukit Brown for an 8-lane highway. The same report gives Hong Kong's six-year limit. Berlin's rest period is at least 20 years, while its Jewish cemeteries keep a permanent right of rest. In Berlin's Tempelhof-Schöneberg district, the rest period on the state-owned cemeteries ends on 31 December 2026 for graves used up to the end of 2006, and the grave right ends with it unless renewed. Hamburg, a 1998 report noted, reused graves after 25 years, while Muslim cemeteries give the dead eternal rest.

Madrid's municipal cemeteries offer a 10-year niche, and publish exhumation notices when a 99-year concession expires. In London, a 2007 act lets burial authorities disturb the remains in a grave to make room for new burials, once the burial right has ended. And in Maryland, "perpetual care" means something smaller than it sounds: the upkeep of the cemetery's grounds and buildings, paid from funds held by a trustee.

Look closer at the wall

As for the woman near Naples, the investigation will decide how a stranger got into her niche. Whatever it finds, she was never its owner. She was its tenant.

Next time you walk past a wall of graves in Italy, look closer. Every new grave granted there since 1976 comes with an end date.

How long does a grave last where you live?

Sources

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