As churches
in Rome go, Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini is a fairly
unexceptional one, but you will get a spooky shock if you creep down to the
crypt! It consists of five dimly lit chambers, the walls of which are covered
in the skulls and bones of 4,000 Capuchin friars; some of them intact and
dressed in habits. The ossuary contains a crypt of skulls, one of leg bones and,
perhaps strangest of all, one of pelvises. Cherubs, normally represented by the
head of an infant flanked by two wings, are odd enough as symbols go, but the Capuchin
version, a skull between two shoulder blades, takes some beating. There are
also some interesting light fixtures which I am sure were not bought flat-packed
on the shelves of the nearest Ikea store.
A plaque in
one of the chapels reads “What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you
shall be” so think on!
Several
famous authors visited the crypt including, unsurprisingly, the Marquis de Sade
who had “never seen anything more striking”. Mark Twain had a word or two to
say about it at the beginning of a chapter in “The Innocents Abroad” and Nathaniel
Hawthorne describes the crypt in his novel “The Marble Faun”. The crypt is well
worth a visit but not for the impressionable.
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