Cemetery sights in Rome
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Capuchin Cemetery
Long after memories of all the rest of Rome's interiors run together in an opulent blur, visitors vividly recall the particulars of the bizarre and macabre chapels of this cemetery, where the decorative elements - from the picture frames to the light fittings - are all made of human bones.
Between 1528 and 1870, the brown-clad Capuchin monks adorned this cemetery with the dried remains of their departed brothers. The message is appropriately pious: 'What you are now we used to be, what we are now you will be'. The effect is rather sensational.
There is an arch crafted from hundreds of skulls, vertebrae used as fleurs-de-lys, and light fixtures made of limb bones. The monk…
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Cimitero Acattolico per gli Stranieri
Despite the busy roads that surround it, Rome’s ‘Non-Catholic Cemetery for Foreigners’ (aka the Protestant Cemetery) is a surprisingly restful place. As the traffic thunders past, you can wander the lovingly tended paths contemplating Percy Bysshe Shelley’s words: ‘It might make one in love with death to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.’ And so he was, along with fellow Romantic poet, John Keats, and a whole host of luminaries, including Antonio Gramsci, the revered founder of the Italian Communist Party.
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Cimitero di Campo Verano
The city’s largest cemetery dates to the Napoleonic occupation of Rome between 1804 and 1814, when an edict ordered that the city’s dead must be buried outside the city walls. Between the 1830s and the 1980s virtually all Catholics who died in Rome (with the exception of popes, cardinals and royalty) were buried here. If you are in the area, it is worth a look for its grand tombs, although try to avoid 2 November (All Souls’ Day), when thousands of Romans flock to the cemetery to leave flowers on the tombs of loved ones.
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Chiesa di Santa Maria della Concezione
There’s nothing special about this 17th-century church but dip into the Capuchin cemetery below and you’ll be gobsmacked. Everything from the picture frames to the light fittings is made of human bones. Between 1528 and 1870 the resident Capuchin monks used the bones of 4000 of their departed brothers to create the mesmerising and macabre display. There’s an arch crafted from hundreds of skulls, vertebrae used as fleurs-de-lys, and light fixtures made of femurs.
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