The Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo

It started because a monastery ran out of room, and ended as a status symbol.

Palermo's Capuchin monastery outgrew its original cemetery in the 16th century, so the monks began excavating crypts beneath it. In 1599 they mummified one of their own, brother Silvestro of Gubbio, newly dead, and placed him in the catacombs. That was meant to be the whole of it: a burial place for friars.

The method was practical. Bodies were dehydrated on racks of ceramic pipes down in the crypts, and sometimes afterwards washed with vinegar. Some were embalmed, others sealed into glass cabinets. Friars were preserved in their everyday clothing, occasionally with the ropes they had worn in penance.

Then it became something people wanted. Over later centuries entombment in the Capuchin catacombs turned into a mark of standing among the citizens of Palermo. Local luminaries left instructions in their wills about which clothes they were to be preserved in, and some arranged for those clothes to be changed at intervals afterwards. Priests were laid out in clerical vestments; others were dressed to contemporary fashion. Relatives came to pray, and to keep the body presentable. Donations from those families are what paid for the upkeep.

So what you walk through is not an ossuary of anonymous dead. It is a corridor of named people, dressed as they asked to be dressed, maintained for generations by their own descendants. Lloyd Graham published a partial catalogue of the named bodies on display in 2023, which is the sort of work that turns a spectacle back into a record.

It is an extraordinary historical document and a genuinely macabre attraction at the same time. Both of those are true, and the people in it were people.