The monument was erected in 1861 in memory of Pietro Gambaro, who has been a rich property owner, a builder and a city councilor and has been celebrated by his contemporaries as an example of moral uprightness and public commitment (he has been the first person to promote the construction of the basilica of the Holy Immaculata in the Via Assarotti in the Genoese quarter of Castelletto, an important eclectic building which was made by many of the same artists who worked in Staglieno in the second half of the 19th century). The allegory of the Hope in the Resurrection – a feminine figure with an anchor and an open book in her hands – stands on the sarcophagus, in which a bas-relief shows the moment in which the angel of death is definitively taking Pietro Gàmbaro away from his wife and his children: the variety of gestures and attitudes of the family members has rendered the scene of the last contact between the deceased and his relatives a sort of narration. The lamentation for the deceased, a theme of classic origin which is often expressed in funerary iconography, here begins to lose its sublimated connotation and starts to include both everyday life and habits, testifying so the individual affections that will survive to death and, from a social point of view, the success of the structural values of the 19th-century bourgeoisie, such as the family.
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