Happy Halloween! Here at Eternally Cool we’re celebrating the scariest of holidays with a series of articles on Spooky Rome. In the past days, we’ve heard about ghosts and ghost stories in the ancient city and we’ve accompanied the 16th-century artist, Benvenuto Cellini, on his mission to raise demons in the Colosseum with the help of a necromancer (who also happened to be a Sicilian priest).
Today we’re headed up the Via Veneto for a vist to the Capucin crypt beneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione. Located just a block or so from Piazza Barberini, the Baroque facade of the church suggests nothing whatsoever about the gruesome cemetery in the crypt below. This is a spooky site that’s not to be missed by anyone who enjoys a bit of Halloween haunting!
The crypt of the church comprises five chapels, the floors of which are covered with earth brought from the Holy Land. Friars that were part of the Capucin community at this church were buried in that holy earth, but when the space was filled, bodies of the long deceased were dug up and dismantled to make room for new occupants. The bones of the disinterred – from some 4000 bodies dating between 1528 and 1870 – were then used to create intricate designs that cover the walls and the vaults of the chapels.
Though this gruesome art is no longer practiced, visitors today can admire the handiwork of past Capucin bone artists. Piles of skulls that form the backdrop for three fully preserved skeletons still clad in their monastic robes. Vertebrae make swirling designs on a chapel vault, while stacked thigh bones form niches from which robe-wearing skeletons peer out towards onlookers. The vault of one chapel bears the image of the Grim Reaper: His face is a real human skull, while the blade of his scythe is created with a column of coccyges (see photo above). Even the chandeliers are intricately constructed of human bones!
Some visitors find the crypt terrifying, while others are absolutely fascinated. And everyone asks about the purpose of this macabre display, which is to remind the living of the delicacy and tenuous nature of life. Thus, the crypt functions as a momento mori on the grandest scale and its purpose is reinforced by an inscription placed near the mummified remains of one monk, which reads:
“Quello che voi siete noi eravamo,
Quello che noi siamo voi sarete.”
[What you are now we were, What we are you will be]
Because the experience of visiting the Capucin crypt is so extraordinary, an endless parade of writers have remarked on the place. Yet, no one’s musings are better than those of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who sent the protagonists of The Marble Faun on a spooky visit to this church and its crypt and offered the following commentary:
Yet let us give the cemetery the praise that it deserves. There is no disagreeable scent, such as might have been expected from the decay of so many holy persons, in whatever odor of sanctity they may have taken their departure. The same number of living monks would not smell half so unexceptionably.
Via Veneto, 27 – (Piazza Barberini). Admission by donation . Open mornings until 12pm and from 3pm to 6pm.
