7 MACABRE PLACES TO VISIT IN ITALY
PROOF THAT CATHOLICS AREN’T AFRAID OF DEATH
The rest of the world tidies death away. It puts the dead behind marble, at a polite distance, and somewhere you visit twice a year with flowers (and maybe a little guilt).
Catholics did the opposite.
We built chapels out of bones, dressed our dead in their best clothes, kept a saint's head in a glass case and went to pray in front of it. To an outsider it can look morbid (dare I say, even ghoulish). To us, though, it was never really about death. It was about what comes after, and about keeping the people we've lost in the room a little while longer.
Here are seven places in Italy where that conviction is impossible to miss.
At a glance: 7 macabre places in Italy to visit
The Catacombs of Rome — kilometres of early Christian burial tunnels running beneath the city
The Capuchin Crypt, Rome — five chapels decorated with the bones of roughly 3,700 friars
The plaster citizens of Pompeii, near Naples — bodies cast in the exact moment they died
San Bernardino alle Ossa, Milan — a bone-walled ossuary ten minutes from the Duomo
The Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo — around 8,000 mummified bodies dressed in their finest
The Fontanelle Cemetery, Naples — a cave of nameless skulls adopted and prayed for by locals
The Cathedral of Otranto — the bones of 813 townspeople killed in a single day in 1480, set behind the altar
The Catacombs of Rome
The earliest Christians buried their dead in tunnels under Rome, and those catacombs still run for miles beneath the city.
From the second century, the faithful carved niches into the soft rock of San Callisto, San Sebastiano, Domitilla and Priscilla, layering their dead along corridors that go on for kilometres. They painted the walls with early Christian symbols (such as the fish, the Good Shepherd, figures praying with open hands, etc). and buried their martyrs here.
The Capuchin Crypt, Rome
Beneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini on Via Veneto sits one of the most extraordinary rooms in Europe. Five small chapels, each decorated floor to ceiling with human bones: the Crypt of Skulls, the Crypt of Pelvises, and the Crypt of Leg Bones and Thigh Bones (as you do). Entire skeletons hang from the walls in their original Capuchin robes, and a skeleton on the ceiling holds a scythe in one hand and a set of scales in the other, both made of bones (in case you were wondering).
When the Capuchin order moved here in 1631, they brought 300 cartloads of their dead with them, because Italians never leave family behind. The decorations came later, sometime in the late 17th or early 18th century, and the purpose was not to horrify but to remind.
The inscription at the entrance reads: Quello che voi siete noi eravamo, quello che noi siamo voi sarete. ‘What you are, we once were. What we are, you will be.’ Chilling! This sacred space is a mirror, held up to anyone who walks through.
The plaster citizens of Pompeii, near Naples
In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius buried Pompeii under metres of volcanic ash so quickly that the city was preserved in the act of living. And dying.
In the 1860s, archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli developed a technique of pouring plaster into the voids left by decomposed bodies, and the results are among the most confronting things you'll ever see in a museum. There are people curled around each other, a dog straining against its chain, a man covering his face, and a mother holding a child.
Dear reader, these aren’t artistic interpretations. They are the shapes of actual people in their final seconds, preserved in the same positions they died in nearly two thousand years ago. It's incredible to witness.
Fun fact: Pompeii is free to visit on the first Sunday of the month.
San Bernardino alle Ossa, Milan
San Bernardino alle Ossa lines the walls of a small Milan chapel with the skulls and bones of the city's dead, and it has done so, free of charge, since the seventeenth century.
The first ossuary went up here in 1210, when the cemetery beside the basilica of Santo Stefano filled past capacity, and the chapel you see today was finished in 1695. The bones belong to ordinary Milanese: hospital patients, prisoners, monks, etc.
It's quieter than its famous Roman cousin and, to my eye, more affecting for it. Nobody here was a buried saint.
The Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo
Palermo's Capuchin Catacombs hold around 8,000 mummified bodies, dressed in their finest and standing along the corridors, and for centuries Sicilians came to visit them the way you'd visit a relative.
It began in 1599 with a single friar, Silvestro of Gubbio, and grew into a vast underground society of the dead, sorted by profession and rank, dried in special chambers, washed with vinegar, propped in niches and open coffins. Being placed here became a point of pride, and families would return to change their loved ones' clothes and pray beside them.
At the end of one corridor lies Rosalia Lombardo, not yet two years old when she died in 1920, embalmed so perfectly by Alfredo Salafia that she still looks asleep, a yellow ribbon in her hair. They call her the Sleeping Beauty. You're asked not to photograph her, and you shouldn't.
The Fontanelle Cemetery, Naples
The Fontanelle Cemetery is a cave beneath Naples filled with the bones of tens of thousands of nameless dead.
Most were the anonymous poor, swept here by the plague of 1656 and the cholera of the 1800s, buried without names or markers. Out of that grew one of the most extraordinary devotions in Italy, the cult of the anime pezzentelle, the poor abandoned souls.
A person would choose a skull, clean it, pray for it, build it a little shrine, and in return ask the soul to intercede for them, for a job, a baby, a win. If the soul answered, the bond held. If it didn't, you chose another. The Church grew uneasy with it and closed the cave in 1969; it reopened in 2010. The Neapolitans, naturally, never really stopped.
The Cathedral of Otranto
Otranto Cathedral keeps the skulls and bones of 813 of its own townspeople behind the main altar, killed in a single day in 1480 and now set in glass for everyone who comes to Mass.
When an Ottoman force took the city that August, as the tradition of the Church holds, the survivors were given the choice to renounce their faith or die. They refused to give up their faith, and as a consequence, were executed on a hill above the town. Their remains were gathered into the cathedral, where the stone said to have been used in their killing also rests.
They were beatified in 1771 and canonised by Pope Francis in 2013 as Saint Antonio Primaldo and Companions, the patrons of the city.
So, why aren't Catholics afraid of death?
Catholics have kept their dead close for two thousand years, and the bone chapels and mummies are the logical end of a faith that treats the grave as a doorway rather than a full stop.
Three ideas sit underneath all of it. There's memento mori, the old discipline of remembering you will die so that you truly live. There's the communion of saints, the belief that the dead aren't gone but are family you can still ask to pray for you. And there's purgatory, where the living pray for the dead and the dead, once safely home, pray back.
Add the resurrection of the body, which means the body is never to be discarded, and a room full of carefully arranged bones, and you’ll start to get an insight into how Catholics view death. These are devotional places, visited by people who come to pray and not only by nosy tourists who come to gawk.
Let me be clear here: this was never a culture in love with death. Instead, it was a culture that refused to pretend death gets the last word.
That’s why the bones are arranged with care, the mummies dressed in their best, and the saint's head set in gold. Because for Catholics, the dead aren’t gone – only elsewhere – and the conversation isn't finished. Italy just built the rooms to do it in, and we did it rather spectacularly.
Go quietly, say a prayer if you have one, and remember that one day someone may keep you in the room too.
FAQs
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The most macabre places in Italy are the Capuchin Crypt in Rome, San Bernardino alle Ossa in Milan, the plaster casts of Pompeii, the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, the Fontanelle Cemetery in Naples, the martyrs' chapel in Otranto Cathedral, and the ancient Catacombs of Rome.
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Catholic churches display bones as memento mori, a reminder that life is short, alongside belief in the communion of saints and the resurrection of the body. The dead are treated as present and as family, so their remains are honoured and kept close rather than hidden away.
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The Capuchin Crypt sits beneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini on Via Veneto, near Piazza Barberini in Rome. It holds the bones of roughly 3,700 friars arranged across five small chapels, and photography isn't allowed inside.
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It isn't disrespectful if you go quietly and treat the sites as the devotional places they are. Many, including the Palermo catacombs, ban photography out of respect for the dead. Keep your voice low, say a prayer if you have one, and you'll be welcome.
