Description
The Capuchin Catacombs are an underground cemetery with about eight thousand mummified bodies, in the basement of Palermo's Capuchin convent. They are striking, in their own way moving, and since the days of the Grand Tour they have been a must-see stop for many travelers. The name is misleading, though: they are not true catacombs, but a cemetery.
Along the Gothic-style galleries, with their cross vaults, the mummies stand upright or lie down, fully dressed. They are divided by sex and social class: prelates, merchants and townspeople in their Sunday best, officers in dress uniform, young women who died before marrying, in wedding dresses.
Whole families sit on high shelves, protected by thin railings as if leaning out over a balcony. The friars themselves are here too: the first to be buried here was Brother Silvestro da Gubbio, on 16 October 1599, and he is the first body on the left after the entrance.
The most famous is Rosalia Lombardo, the "Sleeping Beauty." Born in 1918, she died of pneumonia at two years old, in 1920. Her father, devastated by grief, had her embalmed by Professor Alfredo Salafia, and today she rests in a steel and glass case filled with nitrogen. She looks as if she is asleep.
Her formula remained a secret until 2009, when Salafia's notes were studied: formalin, alcohol, glycerin, salicylic acid and zinc salts. An X-ray showed that the body is intact inside as well.
Being preserved cost money, which is why most of the mummies belong to the upper classes. The method was not for the faint of stomach: the body was left to drain for about a year, after the internal organs had been removed, then washed with vinegar, stuffed with straw and dressed in its own clothes.
Other methods, used above all in times of epidemic, involved a bath in arsenic or in lime water. This is how the peasant Antonino Prestigiacomo, one of the best-known mummies, was embalmed in 1844: he was fifty years old.
In the mid-19th century new health regulations banned burials in churches and basements, and the Capuchin cemetery was created beside the church. One of the last to be admitted to the crypt was little Rosalia herself.
Don't miss
• The Sleeping Beauty.
• The Gothic galleries.
• The funerary monument of Giuseppe Grimau, from 1755.
Did you know?
• The bodies have never been inventoried: the figure of eight thousand is an estimate.
• Among the famous travelers who visited them was the writer Guy de Maupassant.
Along the Gothic-style galleries, with their cross vaults, the mummies stand upright or lie down, fully dressed. They are divided by sex and social class: prelates, merchants and townspeople in their Sunday best, officers in dress uniform, young women who died before marrying, in wedding dresses.
Whole families sit on high shelves, protected by thin railings as if leaning out over a balcony. The friars themselves are here too: the first to be buried here was Brother Silvestro da Gubbio, on 16 October 1599, and he is the first body on the left after the entrance.
The most famous is Rosalia Lombardo, the "Sleeping Beauty." Born in 1918, she died of pneumonia at two years old, in 1920. Her father, devastated by grief, had her embalmed by Professor Alfredo Salafia, and today she rests in a steel and glass case filled with nitrogen. She looks as if she is asleep.
Her formula remained a secret until 2009, when Salafia's notes were studied: formalin, alcohol, glycerin, salicylic acid and zinc salts. An X-ray showed that the body is intact inside as well.
Being preserved cost money, which is why most of the mummies belong to the upper classes. The method was not for the faint of stomach: the body was left to drain for about a year, after the internal organs had been removed, then washed with vinegar, stuffed with straw and dressed in its own clothes.
Other methods, used above all in times of epidemic, involved a bath in arsenic or in lime water. This is how the peasant Antonino Prestigiacomo, one of the best-known mummies, was embalmed in 1844: he was fifty years old.
In the mid-19th century new health regulations banned burials in churches and basements, and the Capuchin cemetery was created beside the church. One of the last to be admitted to the crypt was little Rosalia herself.
Don't miss
• The Sleeping Beauty.
• The Gothic galleries.
• The funerary monument of Giuseppe Grimau, from 1755.
Did you know?
• The bodies have never been inventoried: the figure of eight thousand is an estimate.
• Among the famous travelers who visited them was the writer Guy de Maupassant.