The construction of this huge, oblong Gothic cloister was begun in 1278 by the architect Giovanni di Simone.

It seems that the building was not meant to be a real cemetery, but a church called Santissima Trinità (Most Holy Trinity), but the project changed during the construction.

The inner court is surrounded by elaborate round arches with slender mullions and plurilobed tracery.

In the Aulla chapel we can see also the original incense lamp that Galileo Galilei used for calculation of pendular movements.

In the years he was the curator of the Campo Santo, Carlo Lasinio collected many other ancient relics that were spread in Pisa to make a sort of archeological museum inside the cemetery.

The walls of the vast structure were covered in over 2600 meters squared of frescoes, a greater expanse than the Sistine Chapel.

On 27 July 1944, a bomb fragment from an Allied raid started a fire in the Camposanto, which burned for three days, causing the timber lead roof to collapse.

The destruction of the roof severely damaged everything inside the cemetery, destroying most of the sculptures and sarcophagi and compromising all the frescoes.

An initial effort to rescue the frescoes was organized by Deane Keller of the U.S. Army's Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program.

The restoration campaign concluded with the reinstallation of part of the Buffalmacco cycle in 2005; the Thebaid frescoes in 2014; Hell in 2015; the Last Judgement in 2017; and the Triumph of Death in July 2018.