Close your eyes and picture yourself exploring Rome, the Eternal City. You are walking along the quaint Via Veneto enjoying your gelato when you come upon a beautiful church. You decide to go inside to enjoy the stained glass, or maybe to snap a few pictures. Descending a flight of stairs, you come upon a crypt decorated in what appears to be the baroque style. But with a closer look, you can see that the frescoes and gilded ornamentation have been replaced by row upon row of human bones. No, you haven’t stepped into a horror movie.
This is the crypt of Santa Maria della Concezione, a church commissioned by Pope Urban XIII in 1626.
The re-location of the capuchin order of monks to this church in the mid-seventeenth century was a major move. Not only were the monks required to bring with them everything they would need to begin a new holy house, the pope’s brother ordered them to bring their deceased brethren along for the ride. These remains were placed on the walls of the lower level of the new church in intricate designs. The most famous depiction is of death himself, complete with bone constructed scythe and scales of justice.
The crypt is multi-chambered, containing a room of leg bones, a room of skulls and a room of pelvises to name just a few. Some of the monks in the skull room even remain dressed in the habits in which they served.
The site has had its share of illustrious visitors over the centuries, including Mark Twain and the Marquis de Sade who wrote: "I have never seen anything more striking"
To be technically accurate, this is not a crypt. It is an ossuary. An ossuary is an above ground cemetery where only skeletal remains are housed. Bodies are put in a sort of storage area after death, where the remains are allowed to rot until only the skeleton is left. Ossuaries are not uncommon in heavily populated areas, since the storage of a skeleton alone takes up far less space than a large coffin.
Far from rare, these kind of decorative ossuaries pop up all over the world, including Monastery of San Francisco in Lima, Peru, San Bernardino alle Ossa in Milan and the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic.
The sentiment of these places is captured quite well in the plaque displayed at Maria della Concezione. It reads: "What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be." The capuchin monks displayed the bones of their predecessors in order to remind them that death is never more than a few steps behind. One must always be prepared to face God.
http://neatorama.cachefly.net/images/2007-09/sedlec-ossuary-chandelier.jpg
http://www.flickr.com/photos/lafeffa/3275995677/
http://atlasobscura.com/places/santa-maria-della-concezione
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