The Chilling Capuchin Catacombs Of Palermo: One Of The Scariest Places In Italy
Gmihail at Serbian Wikipedia/Wikimedia CommonsMany of the bodies interned at the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Italy have tragic backstories.
Cemeteries can be creepy places to visit. But it’s sometimes even more unsettling to wander through catacombs and crypts, where the bones of the dead often line the walls. This is certainly true of the next creepy place on our list, the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo.
The catacombs, tucked beneath the Sicilian city, are home to some 8,000 corpses. Many are mere skeletons — though attired in clothing — and others are mummies, carefully preserved and kept behind glass. They fill nearly every nook and cranny of the space. Visitors will find human remains hanging from the walls, tucked into shelves, and lying in glass coffins.
At first, the catacombs were reserved only for Capuchin monks (so named for the hoods, or capuche, that they wore as religious garb). But Capuchin Catacombs were eventually split into different sections, with each housing different groups. There’s one room, for example, for religious figures. Another room is preserved for women, virgins, and babies. And one of the most famous bodies at the Capuchin Catacombs belongs to a little girl named Rosalia Lombardo.
Fabrizio Villa/Getty ImagesRosalia Lombardo is one of the most famous mummies at the Capuchin Catacombs, one of the scariest places on Earth.
In 1920, Rosalia died just a week shy of her second birthday after falling ill during the Spanish Flu pandemic. Her devastated father reached out to a famous embalmer named Alfredo Salafia, who preserved her body using a combination of formalin, zinc salts, alcohol, salicylic acid, and glycerin.
As a result, Rosalia Lombardo’s corpse still has her hair, pale skin, and, visible beneath her lashes, blue eyes. She’s so well-preserved that some visitors to the Capuchin Catacombs have claimed that they saw her “blink.” However, experts say that this is just a trick of the light.
Her remains — and the remains of about 8,000 other corpses — can be visited by the public. Those who want to wander the crypts and look upon the corpses need only a few euros — and a brave heart.
