The Museum of Death

When you say Palermo, imagine an exotic cocktail mixed with history, culture, art, luxury and macabre stories. Palermo became popular thanks to “The Godfather” trilogy, but that is subject for another day.

This city will enchant you with it’s monuments (a lot of them. I’ve been there three years in a row and I didn’t succeded to visit all of them), geography (you have the impresion that the mountains fall in to the sea) and good food.

But if you are looking for something different, I recomand to go to the Piazza Cappuccini 1. Here you will find a “museum”… a museum of death, the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo.

This is how the entrence looks:

Nothing scary, right?
But when you enter and descends the stairs to the catacoms, everything changes. The death corridors opens in front of you with 8000 corpses, and the low light combined with the smell of death people gives you cold chills.

The Capuchin Catacombs were built as a simple cemetery for the monks. The first mummy exposed was that of Fra Silvestro da Gubbio in 1599.
After centuries, the catacombs became a symbol of rich people, and those who could afforded, were mummified and exposed here.

The bodies were dehydrated on the racks of ceramic pipes in the catacombs and sometimes later washed with vinegar. Some of the bodies were embalmed and others enclosed in sealed glass cabinets.

Rosalia Lombardo, also refferd as “The Sleeping Beauty of Palermo” was the last burried in the catacombs. Her body can be found at the end of the first corridor, in the chapel of Santa Rosalia, between two coffins with the corpses of children. In 1920 the two years old girl, died of pneumonia. She was the dauther of a noble family and she was embalmed by Alfredo Salafia, that made a special formula trying to make the girl “live forever” as the father asked him. Rosalia Lombardo is so perfectly preserved that she is considered “the world’s most beautiful mummy”.