Went upstairs to the rooftop terrace this morning for a lovely buffet breakfast consisting of breads, pastries, charcuterie, cheeses, eggs and all good thing while wondering what to do today. Both of us have been to Rome before and see a lot of the highlights and while we are scheduled to check out places like the Colosseum, the Vatican, the Pantheon and the like, later in the week – we had no set plans today based on the ‘wait-and-see-how-we-pull-up-after-shitty-long-flight’ factor.
So we decided we’d go for a wander about 10 mins from here (being the Fontana di Trevi… did I mention the Trevi Fountain is right outside our window, and is the stunning backdrop to our breakfast on the rooftop patio?) to the Santa Maria della Concepzio de Cappuccini. Which is a gorgeous church (below), complete with museum, and crypt full of the bones of 3700 Capuchin order friars semi-interred in an artistic interior design display.
Apparently, when friars arrived at this church in the 1630s, they brought 300 odd cartloads of deceased friars’ remains with them. There was a strange-ish friar Fr. Michael of Bergame who was responsible for the arrangement of the bones in the crypts. They also had soil bought in from Jerusalem thanks to the generosity of Pope Urban VIII in order to bury any monks that would subsequently die… So when another monk died, they were buried in the crypt without a coffin, and allowed to decompose in the soil from Jerusalem, and when they ran out of room, they would exhume him and add his bones to the decorative motifs surrounding the interesting soils of the crypts. Bodies spent roughly 30 years in the soil before being exhumed and added to the artwork.
The Church (and the guides here) insist that the display is not meant to be a sort of danse macabre, but rather a contemplative reminder of how short our lives on Earth are and a sharp refresher on the nature of human mortality, in case any of us forget.
Photography is forbidden in the crypts, so I have plucked some images off their website and various… I have a feeling there is going to be a lot of ‘stock’ photos plucked off wikipedia for posts on this trip, if they keep up this ‘no photos allowed’ shite.
The central motif of this ‘piece’ is the crossed arms that is the symbol of the Franciscan order – the skeletal arm of Jesus, crossed with the clothed arm of St Francis, surrounded by columns made of skulls, in between a wall lined in skulls and femurs, under an archway made of shoulder blades and tailbones.
All of these displays are made with the bones of exhumed friars/monks. The last friar who was buried in the crypts was exhumed in 1870, so good to know it’s not a ‘work in progress’ still. O.o The bones are artistically display to depict many religious symbols and reminders of Earthly life. There are tailbones used to create hour glass shapes, skull used to create walls with the entire skeletons of some friars used to show the walk of man through life. There is bones used to make lanterns, bones lining the walls, the roof the archways. It is really fascinating in a absolutely creepy kind of way – I don’t care what the Church says the intent is.
Many famous persons have come to visit here over the centuries – Mark Twain, the Marquis de Sade, and Nigel Hawthorne to name a few,
“The reflection that he must someday be taken apart like an engine or a clock…and worked up into arches and pyramids and hideous frescoes, did not distress this monk in the least. I thought he even looked as if he were thinking, with complacent vanity, that his own skull would look well on top of the heap and his own ribs add a charm to the frescoes which possibly they lacked at present.” ~ Mark Twain
Might look for something a little more cheerful to check out after lunch!