Capuchin Crypt

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.

The friars moved to this church in 1631 and brought with them some 300 cartloads of remains from their old friary. The soil of the crypt, according to tradition, was brought from Jerusalem at the order of Pope Urban VIII. As each friar died, the one who had lain longest in the earth, often around thirty years, was exhumed to make room, and his bones were added to the decoration. The burials continued until 1870, the end of the period in which the Church allowed burial in and beneath churches.

There are six rooms in all. The Crypt of the Resurrection frames a painting of Christ raising Lazarus with bones; the Mass Chapel, the only one without remains, holds the heart of Maria Felice Peretti, grand-niece of Pope Sixtus V. After it come the Crypt of the Skulls, the Crypt of the Pelvises, the Crypt of the Leg and Thigh Bones, and finally the Crypt of the Three Skeletons, where a skeleton set in an oval on the ceiling holds a scythe and a pair of scales, symbols of death and judgement. The Marquis de Sade visited in 1775 and wrote that he had never seen anything more striking; Nathaniel Hawthorne set a scene of The Marble Faun here, and Mark Twain described the crypt in The Innocents Abroad.

Getting there

The crypt lies under the church on Via Veneto, beside Piazza Barberini in central Rome, about 2 km from the Esquilino district. Rome Ciampino Airport (CIA) is about 15 km away, and Barberini station on Metro Line A is at the foot of the street.