The Hands of the Capuchin Crypt

Beneath the Capuchin friary in Palermo lies a corridor of the standing dead. Some eight thousand bodies line these Sicilian catacombs, many of them mounted upright in niches along the walls, dressed in the clothes they were buried in, hands folded or reaching, jaws slackened by the long centuries into expressions the living cannot quite read.

The custom began with a shortage of space. When the friars ran out of room in their communal grave in the late sixteenth century, they excavated crypts beneath the church and discovered, almost by accident, that the porous tuff rock and dry circulating air did something remarkable to the dead. Bodies laid on the stone racks did not rot so much as slowly desiccate. The first friar so preserved, Brother Silvestro of Gubbio, was placed there in 1599, and for three hundred years afterward the townsfolk of Palermo aspired to join him.

A place in the catacombs became a mark of status. Priests, professionals, virgins and children were separated into their own galleries, families paying to keep a relative dressed and visible, returning on feast days to visit and, when funds allowed, to change the corpse’s clothes. The bodies were first drained and dried in special chambers, then sometimes washed with vinegar before being displayed.

The last regular interment came in the 1920s, and among the final arrivals is the curio’s true wonder: Rosalia Lombardo, a child of not quite two who died of pneumonia in 1920. Embalmed by a Sicilian doctor whose formula included formalin and zinc salts, she remains so intact that her eyelashes and fine hair endure, an infant who appears merely to be sleeping.

Provenance: the Capuchin Catacombs, Palermo, Sicily; interments circa 1599 to 1920s.