The Most Remarkable Catacombs in the World
10 places in 3 countries · updated 14 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most remarkable catacombs in the world are Catacombs of Paris (France), Catacombe dei Cappuccini (Italy) and Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa (Egypt). The list covers 10 catacombs in 3 countries. Italy has the most, with 7. Last updated 14 October 2026.
Catacombs are burial places cut underground: galleries lined with niches, small chambers, sometimes whole painted halls beneath a city. Over time the word stretched to ossuaries where bones were stacked into walls and patterns, and to crypts where the dead were preserved and dressed. Their strange beauty comes from order imposed on death, the repetition of niches and skulls, the craft spent on rooms few would ever see, and the silence of rock overhead.
The Catacombs of Paris fill old limestone quarries beneath the city with the remains of millions of people, moved there from overcrowded cemeteries from the late eighteenth century and arranged in walls of bones and skulls. The Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa in Alexandria, from around the second century AD, mix Egyptian, Greek and Roman motifs in a single tomb. In Palermo the Capuchin Catacombs keep rows of mummified and clothed bodies, and in Naples the Catacombs of San Gennaro preserve early Christian painting while the Fontanelle cemetery, a former quarry, holds skulls once tended by local people. In Rome the Capuchin Crypt decorates its chapels with the bones of friars.
The catacombs here were chosen for how they look and ranked by beauty. Each has its own text, a photograph with its author credited and a point on the map, and the section can also be opened by country.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | Country | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Catacombs of Paris | Catacombs | France | |
| 2 | Catacombe dei Cappuccini | Catacombs | Italy | |
| 3 | Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa | Catacombs | Egypt | |
| 4 | Catacomb of Priscilla | Catacombs | Italy | |
| 5 | Catacombs of San Gennaro | Catacombs | Italy | |
| 6 | Serapeum of Saqqara | Catacombs | Egypt | |
| 7 | Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter | Catacombs | Italy | |
| 8 | Catacombs of Domitilla | Catacombs | Italy | |
| 9 | Fontanelle cemetery | Catacombs | Italy | |
| 10 | Capuchin Crypt | Catacombs | Italy |
01 Catacombs of Paris
Catacombes de Paris
France · 3.1 km from Paris48.834° N 2.332° E
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 Twenty metres beneath the 14th arrondissement, in tunnels left by centuries of limestone quarrying, lie the bones of several million Parisians. The Catacombs of Paris are an ossuary created to empty the city's overflowing cemeteries, and the walk through them is one of the strangest in any European capital: a long, cool corridor of stone that suddenly turns into walls built entirely of skulls and long bones, stacked with a care that is almost decorative.
Did you know? The ossuary holds the remains of more than six million people, yet it occupies only a small part of the old quarry tunnels beneath Paris.
02 Catacombe dei Cappuccini
Italy · 1.9 km from Palermo38.112° N 13.339° E
Giacomo Palermo · CC BY-SA 4.0 Beneath the Capuchin friary in Palermo lies one of Europe's most unsettling burial places: corridors lined with the dressed, dried and upright bodies of Palermitans who died between the late sixteenth and early twentieth centuries. The friars began digging crypts here at the end of the 1500s, when their cemetery had filled up, and in 1599 they preserved one of their own, Brother Silvestro of Gubbio, and laid him below ground. The method was simple: bodies were left to dry out on racks of terracotta pipes, then sometimes rinsed with vinegar, dressed and set in niches or glass-fronted cases. At first only friars were buried this way, but being preserved among the Capuchins soon became a mark of standing for the city's families.
Did you know? Brother Silvestro of Gubbio, the first friar laid here on 16 October 1599, still lies first on the left after the entrance.
03 Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa
Egypt · 4.5 km from Alexandria31.187° N 29.905° E
Asiatologist · CC BY-SA 4.0 The Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa are the largest Roman-era burial complex in Egypt and one of the strangest: a tomb where Egyptian gods wear Roman armour. Cut into the bedrock of Alexandria in the second century AD, they lay forgotten until 1900, when, as the story goes, a donkey fell through the ground into the access shaft. The name means "mound of shards", after the heaps of broken pottery left by visitors who broke the jars and dishes they had brought for meals in honour of the dead.
Did you know? The three sarcophagi have lids that cannot be lifted; the bodies are thought to have been placed inside from behind, via a passage circling the tomb chamber.
04 Catacomb of Priscilla
Catacombe di Priscilla
Italy · 4.2 km from Rome41.930° N 12.509° E
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain Beneath the Via Salaria, on the northern side of Rome, lies one of the richest of the city's early Christian cemeteries. The Catacomb of Priscilla was dug from an ancient quarry and grew into many kilometres of galleries on two levels, used for burials from the late second century into the fourth. In antiquity it was called the "Queen of the Catacombs" for the number of martyrs laid here, and the popes Marcellinus and Marcellus I were among those buried in it. Its name is traditionally linked to a Priscilla of the senatorial Acilii Glabriones family, whose name has been found in the underground rooms, though the question of who she was remains open.
05 Catacombs of San Gennaro
Catacombe di San Gennaro
Italy · 2.5 km from Naples40.864° N 14.248° E
Dominik Matus · CC BY-SA 4.0 Beneath the slope that climbs from the Sanità district to Capodimonte in northern Naples lies the largest Christian catacomb complex in southern Italy. Unlike the narrow galleries of Rome, the Catacombs of San Gennaro were cut into soft tuff on two levels with broad, high passages, and even whole churches were carved out of the rock. The nucleus was the tomb of a wealthy Roman family of the second or third century; at the end of the third century it received the body of Agrippinus, bishop of Naples and the city's first patron saint, and in the fifth century Bishop John I brought here the remains of Januarius — San Gennaro — martyred in 305. From then on the site bore his name.
Did you know? The catacombs lie beneath the Sanità district, a valley long nicknamed the Valley of the Dead for its many burial grounds.
06 Serapeum of Saqqara
Egypt · 15.1 km from Giza29.875° N 31.212° E
No machine-readable author provided. Neithsabes assumed (based on copyright claims). · Public domain Deep under the desert at Saqqara runs a corridor lined with enormous stone boxes, each cut from a single block of granite or basalt and big enough to hold a bull. This is the Serapeum, the burial place of the Apis bulls, sacred animals of the god Ptah at Memphis, the old capital of Egypt. A bull chosen by its markings was revered during its life, and at death it was believed to become one with Osiris, as Osiris-Apis, a name that in Greek times turned into Serapis and gave the catacomb its modern name.
Did you know? Herodotus wrote that an Apis bull had to be black, with a white triangle on its brow, an eagle shape on its back and a knot under its tongue.
07 Catacombs of Marcellinus and Peter
Catacombe dei Santi Marcellino e Pietro
Italy · 6 km from Rome41.879° N 12.549° E
Unknown author Unknown author · Public domain The Catacombs of Saints Marcellinus and Peter lie beneath the Via Casilina, at the third mile of the ancient Via Labicana, and together with the imperial mausoleum above them form one of the richest ensembles of early Christian Rome. The galleries were dug between the second half of the third century and the early fifth century and extend over about three hectares, with some 4.5 km of passages on several levels. They take their name from the martyrs Marcellinus and Peter, who according to tradition were executed under Diocletian in 304 and buried here; the place was known in antiquity as "ad duas lauros", at the two laurels.
08 Catacombs of Domitilla
Catacombe di Domitilla
Italy · 4.8 km from Rome41.859° N 12.506° E
Anonymous Unknown author · Public domain Beneath the fields and lanes south of Rome's ancient walls, the volcanic tuff is threaded with one of the largest underground cemeteries of the early Church. The Catacombs of Domitilla run for kilometres through narrow corridors stacked on four levels, their walls lined with tier upon tier of empty burial niches, and they open, unusually, into a church: a three-aisled basilica sunk half below ground into the cemetery itself. Few places convey so directly how the first Christian communities of the city buried and remembered their dead.
Did you know? The Catacombs of Domitilla are among the largest underground cemeteries in Rome, with galleries on four levels.
09 Fontanelle cemetery
Cimitero delle Fontanelle
Italy · 1.8 km from Naples40.858° N 14.239° E
Lalupa · CC BY-SA 3.0 Rows of skulls, many thousands of them, line the galleries of a former tuff quarry cut into the hillside of Materdei, at the western end of the Sanità valley in Naples. The Fontanelle cemetery is an ossuary rather than a graveyard: three great trapezoidal galleries, each roughly a hundred metres long and ten to fifteen metres high, are joined by side passages, and the Neapolitans long called them naves, as if the quarry were a basilica. The cavity is estimated at around 30,000 cubic metres, and the visible remains are usually put at about 40,000 people.
Did you know? The cemetery covers some 3,000 square metres, and the bones are thought to lie compacted to a depth of about four metres beneath the floor.
10 Capuchin Crypt
Italy · 1 km from Rome41.905° N 12.489° E
Anil Öztas · CC BY 4.0 Beneath the church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini, a few steps from Piazza Barberini, a narrow corridor runs past a row of small chapels whose walls, vaults and lamps are made entirely of human bones. Skulls are stacked into arches and niches, while pelvises, leg bones and smaller bones are worked into patterns that cover the walls and ceilings. The bones are believed to belong to about 3,700 people, most of them friars of the Capuchin order, along with some poor Romans buried beneath the floor. The order presents the display not as something macabre but as a meditation on mortality, and a placard in the last chapel addresses the visitor in five languages: what you are now, we used to be; what we are now, you will be.
Did you know? The bone decoration is credited to a friar, Father Michael of Bergamo, who arranged the remains in the crypt.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What is the difference between catacombs and an ossuary?
- Catacombs are underground galleries where the dead were laid in niches or chambers. An ossuary is a place where bones are gathered after their first burial; the Catacombs of Paris are in fact a vast ossuary.
- How many people are buried in the Catacombs of Paris?
- The remains of roughly six million people were moved into the former quarries beneath Paris from the late eighteenth century onward.
- What are the most remarkable catacombs in the world?
- On our list, Catacombs of Paris (France) ranks first, followed by Catacombe dei Cappuccini (Italy) and Catacombs of Kom el Shoqafa (Egypt).
- Which country has the most catacombs in this collection?
- In our collection, the most come from Italy (7), Egypt (2) and France (1).
- How many catacombs are on this list in the world?
- The list covers 10 catacombs in 3 countries. Italy has the most, with 7.