Page 128 - The Rough Guide of Sicily

views over the surrounding greenery.

Catacombe dei Cappuccini
Piazza Cappuccini • April–Oct daily 9am–noon & 3–6pm; Nov–March daily 9am–12.30pm & 3–5.30pm • €3 •
091 652 4156 • Take bus #327 from Piazza Indipendenza southwest along Via dei Cappuccini as far as Via
Pindemonte, and then follow the signposts for a couple of hundred metres

Of all the attractions on the edge of Palermo, it’s the Catacombe dei Cappuccini that
generates the most interest among visitors. For several hundred years the Cappuccini
placed its dead brothers in catacombs under the church and later, up until 1881, rich
laymen and others were interred here too. Some 8000 bodies in all were preserved by
various chemical and drying processes – including dehydration, the use of vinegar and

arsenic baths, and treatment with quicklime – and then placed in niches along rough-
cut subterranean corridors, dressed in a suit of clothes that they had previously
provided for the purpose. In different caverns reserved for men, women, the clergy,
doctors, lawyers and surgeons, the bodies are pinned with an identifying tag, some
decomposed beyond recognition, others complete with skin, hair and eyes, fixing you
with a steely stare. Those that aren’t arranged along the walls lie in stacked glass
coffins, and, to say the least, it’s an unnerving experience to walk among them. Times
change, though, as Patrick Brydone noted in his late eighteenth-century A Tour

Through Sicily and Malta:

Here the people of Palermo pay daily visits to their deceased friends … here they familiarize themselves with
their future state, and chuse the company they would wish to keep in the other world. It is a common thing to
make choice of their nich, and to try if their body fits it … and sometimes, by way of a voluntary penance,
they accustom themselves to stand for hours in these niches …

Of all the skeletal bodies, saddest are the many remains of babies and young children,
nothing more than spindly puppets. Follow the signs for the sealed-off cave that
contains the coffin of two-year-old Rosalia Lombardo, who died in 1920. A new
process, a series of injections, preserved her to the extent that she looks as though
she’s asleep. Perhaps fortunately, the doctor who invented the technique died before

he could tell anyone how it was done.