In keeping with the upcoming Halloween celebrations, Melisande Aquilina remembers a visit to a particularly eerie shrine in Sicily – the mummified corpses at the Capuchin catacombs.

As the barrage of Halloween parties approaches, together with the mad scramble for innovative costumes and the usual scary-yet-funny movie marathons between friends, I started reminiscing about one particular visit to a venue which would truly renders the spirit of this celebration.

A couple of years ago I was spending a long weekend in Sicily and, for the first time ever, was simply taking it easy meandering around Palermo. We had nothing specific planned, so we decided to go with the flow.

Up till that point, I had thought that the scariest thing about Palermo was the traffic. It was a Monday morning and the mad race to find viable parking spots had caused us to leave our rented car literally miles away.

Be that as it may, we had secured our passage with Ryanair for a ripping €30 each with return, so it would have been churlish to complain about such small inconveniences.

As we were strolling along a small square, we glimpsed a plain chapel, which we thought would be worth visiting. The square was Piazza Capuccini and a little church, Chiesa Santa Maria della Pace. Unfortunately, the chapel was closed at that time yet, by its side we could make out a small sign bearing the legend Catacombe dei Cappuccini.

A small group of people was gathered in front of the tiny doorway, waiting. Intrigued, we went to take a look and immediately realised that we had stumbled on a curious and unusual treasure-trove.

Although the sign heralding the site is not very noticeable, this by no means signifies that the Capuchin Catacombs are an unknown or unimportant. In fact, there are hundreds of websites, photos, and information dedeicated to the history of this unique site.

People started paying enormous sums for the honour of being mummified and preserved

Originally, the crypts had been part of a 16th-century Capuchin monastery. At first, the good friars had apparently started burying their dead brethren in a mass grave. However, as the body count grew, they decided to excavate the present catacombs near the church. The story goes that when they started to transfer the bodies of their ex-brothers, they realised that a number of these had been naturally preserved and mummified in such a way as to remain almost intact.

The monks took this as a sign from above and decided to preserve the mummified cadavers upright, in specially-prepared niches around the walls of the catacombs.

And this was how the catacombs became a ‘museum of death’, as we jokingly dubbed it after reading the term within the brochure given to us. The one downside to this site is that no photos are allowed within the underground labyrinth of caves. Every inch of the place is monitored with CCTV cameras. A Swedish guy in front of us tried to stealthily take a photo with his mobile phone and was instantly put in his place – through the surrounding speakers, if you please – and his mobile phone confiscated for the duration of his visit.

At first impression you might think that the catacombs contain only the desiccated bodies of monks and friars – but this is far from the truth. After starting the crypt, these particular Capuchins became popular and rich families started to perceive the idea of being entombed into the catacombs as a status symbol.

The monks themselves started studying new methods of embalming and people started paying enormous sums for the honour of being mummified and preserved in order for their loved ones to be able to visit them and pray for them, while being able to actually still see them.

They even left instructions in their wills, detailing which clothes they wanted their mummy to be bedecked in. Talk about a creepy fad…

As we entered the site, the first thing that struck me was the sombre silence – quite fitting, given the circumstances. One ascends down a tunnel and enters into a cold, hushed world – a chilly basement where the dry and cool atmosphere is controlled to hold back the ravages of time and prevent the deterioration of the corpses as much as possible.

It is a carnival of skeletons and cadavers, definitely not for the faint-hearted. Bedecked in their clerical vestments, the dead capuchins gaze at the mesmerised tourist with dark, dank eyes, while their secular comrades show off clothes in the fashion of their times, ranging from the 17th century, to the 1920s, when the last corpses were interred.

She looks like a little sleeping porcelain doll, perfect and pretty

Skin slowly peeling off desiccated bones, hollowed-out cheeks sporting uncanny grimaces and yellowed teeth, corpses ghoulishly bedecked in frills and satin grinning eerily on, as their bodies pose in nightmarish stances, propped up with wood, hay and other materials… sounds quite like a scene from a Halloween movie, doesn’t it?

The Capuchin catacombs contain around 8,000 corpses. Apart from open-casket funerals, I had never seen a body in my life. The sight of 8,000 of them around me – upright, sitting down, miming everyday actions and seemingly almost to talk among themselves – was, I admit, a bit of a shock.

Awed and intrigued, I walked through the enormous cavern, wondering at the work involved. The halls within the catacombs are divided into categories, the signs stating clearly whether the mummies themselves belong to men, women, virgins (there were only five or six of these – out of thousands), children, priests, monks, and professionals.

However, the most famous of the interred bodies is little Rosalia Lombardo, who was almost two-years-old when she died of pneumonia. Her young age is not the reason why she is so famous, since there are even tinier skeletons of new-born babies preserved in the crypt. Nicknamed the ‘Sleeping Beauty’, little Rosalia’s body is almost intact. She looks like a little sleeping porcelain doll, perfect and pretty.

Even her eyelashes and delicate lips are intact. I was astonished and unnerved, while reading on the information panel provided that she had been dead and enshrined in the catacombs for almost a 100 years.

At the end of the visit, I emerged again in daylight, like Lazarus coming back from the dead. I was pensive and disturbed after such an unusual spectacle. And I was definitely sorry that I had nothing to show for it, since taking photos causes damage to the skeletons themselves.

It is a fact, however, that after viewing such a macabre and unique spectacle one doesn’t really need photographs or pictures as a reminder, since the impact and fascinating horror of such a display is truly unforgettable.

www.palermocatacombs.com/

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