Capuchin Crypt
The Capuchin Crypt is a small space comprising several tiny chapels located beneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini on the Via Veneto near Piazza Barberini in Rome, Italy. It contains the skeletal remains of 3,700 bodies believed to be Capuchin friars buried by their order. The Catholic order insists that the display is not meant to be macabre, but a silent reminder of the swift passage of life on Earth and our own mortality.
When the monks arrived at the church in 1631, moving from the old monastery, they brought 300 cartloads of deceased friars. Fr. Michael of Bergamo oversaw the arrangement of the bones in the burial crypt. The soil in the crypt was brought from Jerusalem, by order of Pope Urban VIII.
As monks died during the lifetime of the crypt, the longest-buried monk was exhumed to make room for the newly deceased who was buried without a coffin, and the newly reclaimed bones were added to the decorative motifs. Bodies typically spent 30 years decomposing in the soil, before being exhumed.
There are six total rooms in the crypt, five featuring a unique display of human bones believed to have been taken from the bodies of friars who had died between 1528 and 1870.
"What you are now we used to be; what we are now you will be..."
The Marquis de Sade noted that he found his 1775 journey to the crypt was worth the effort, and Nathaniel Hawthorne noted its grotesque nature in his 1860 novel The Marble Faun.
As of 1851, the crypt was only opened to the public, in exchange for an admittance fee, for the week following All Souls Day.
From 1851 to 1852, women were not allowed admittance to the crypt.
Coordinates: 41°54′16.7″N 12°29′19.2″E / 41.904639°N 12.488667°E
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