Catacombs in an Italian monastery filled with thousands of corpses

There is a macabre tourist attraction in Palermo, Sicily: The Capuchin Crypt, a chamber under a Capuchin monastery that was founded in the 16th century. In the Capuchin Catacombs, visitors encounter strange characters. The fully clothed human remains are spectacular evidence of a bygone era. Tourists can marvel at thousands of corpses in the caves, all of them local citizens who died in the mid-16th century.

The dead await you as soon as you enter the catabombs, and they are not laid out gently or even stowed in coffins, but upright trellises like in a ghost army. In total, there should be almost 2000 deceased. Most of them are still wearing their clothes: black suits, frilled dresses, frocks and uniforms, riddled with holes and eaten away. The really disturbing thing is that the dead are in different stages of decomposition.

On some collars there is only a bare skull with bared teeth and black eye sockets. Wrinkled brown leather skin stretches over other heads, framed by a few tufts of black hair. Due to special climatic conditions - constant drafts and walls made of tuff stone that absorb moisture - the dead rot less than they dry up. The Capuchins discovered this effect in 1599.

After a while, rich Palermitans also found pleasure in being able to visit their loved ones beyond the end. Soon the rush was so great that the Capuchins expanded the corridor system and the dead stopped in the so-called drying chamber for about eight to ten months until they assigned them a permanent place, sorted by men and women, priests and teachers. In the 19th century the cult of the dead was banned, but after that - this is Italy - it continued for a few decades.

The biggest attraction is the body of little Rosalia Lombardo, who was killed by the Spanish flu in 1920. The two-year-old's father, General Mario Lombardo, was heartbroken. And since he was a man of some influence, he commissioned the famous embalmer Alfredo Salafia to take care of his daughter, at least externally. With Rosalia, the chemist created his masterpiece: the "most beautiful mummy in the world".