081 crypti cappuccini

Last weekend I visited the Crypti Cappuccini - The Crypt of the Cappuchin Monks, very Nancy Drew.

The crypt is found on Via Veneto, just up from Piazza Barberini. The main church, Santa Maria della Concezione, is on the left, and a small door on the right leads into the crypt. The crypt consists of about 6 chambers in a row of varying sizes, with masonry vaults spanning each room. The visitor walks down a narrow corridor, and the crypt rooms are all on the left.

Inside each room are dead monks. There are a few hundred skeletons in each room, and over 4000 skeletons total. In most rooms, there were between 3 and 9 full skeletons wearing the Capuchin robes, some standing up, others lying down. The rest of the room were decorated with a certain type of bones. For example, there would be a wall of skulls, a vault of leg bones, and a ceiling of shoulder blades. Even the chandelier lamps hanging in the corridor were made completely of human bones.

Sorry that I can't relate the technical names of the bones, but it seems that most Americans know more about anatomy than I do, as I overheard many a mother or father telling their children: "see, there's a femur! And look, a scapula!", while the kids looked either pre-vomitatious or like this was the coolest thing they ever saw.

The visitor views these rooms via a narrow dead-end corridor, crowded with tourists (almost all American, not sure why...). So you're close enough to reach out and touch the bones. But it's not just piles of bones laying around - they have been artistically composed in abstract architectural patterns.

Most of the remains were only bone, although some cadavers must have gone through some kind of mummification process, since the skin was still intact.

I suppose the monks were reminding themselves that the physical body is meaningless after death - but whatever the rationale, it's definitely a unique place to visit.