Never did I think our proposed window shopping day near Palazzo Barberini would lead to an impromptu visit to the Capuchin Crypt held within Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini. My friend and I were casually walking around when we walked by the facade of the church and decided to check it out, because the diagonal steps leading up to it looked interesting. Once there, we both felt like we recognized the name as there were signs pointing towards the crypt and a ticket office (an unusual sight at a church since entrance to all churches in Rome are free), when we realized that this was probably the place with the crypt decorated with human bones. I had heard of it before, and another friend had mentioned visiting it at one point at the beginning of the semester, but its existence had completely slipped my mind. I was definitely not mentally prepared to take all of it in, but we exchanged looks and paid our €6 to enter one of the most interesting spaces I have ever encountered. I was imagining the Capuchin Crypt to just be a single room with an altar constructed of bones (or something of that sort), but what I saw instead was beyond anything I could have ever imagined. It is just so completely bizarre and simultaneously so disturbingly beautiful, I was overcome with a sensation I will probably never be able to explain and also never be able to forget.

Turning the corner after walking through the museum filled with interesting antique artifacts used by the Franciscan friars in Rome and passing by some existential quotes plastered onto the wall, we were taken by surprise to be immediately faced with an archway lined with bones around the ceiling, opening up to just room after room of white walls decorated with this blackened bone everywhere. Hundreds of jawbones fit together to create diamond patterns that ran up the curved ceilings, and individual vertebrae outlines intricate patterns all over the walls. To imagine that one human only has two legs, and thus two shin and two thigh bones, and then to see the thousands stacked higher than my own height against the walls brought into perspective just how many deaths we were bearing witness to. Traveling through the spaces, we encountered the Room of Pelvic Bones, the Room of Shins and Thigh Bones, and the Room of Skulls, all stacked high with those particular grotesque yet delicate human remains. Though it seems like utter madness to even imagine creating rooms of the bones of the deceased, some of the imagery was actually quite beautiful. One of the comments on the room of the pelvic bones referring to the skulls mounted with two pelvic bones on each side in a wing-like manner noted that this was an allusion to the idea that time does not simply pass by, but instead time flies. Another striking image was that of the complete skeleton holding a scythe and balance in both hands as if to suggest the fine line between upholding life and being summoned by death. What probably affected me the most was to find myself standing directly under chandeliers made of human bone, dangling literally less than two feet away from my head, that were too close for comfort because they looked as if they would fall at any moment, which would put me in physical contact with these now relics that were once surrounded by flesh and blood of my own species. Not to mention the figures reconstructed as friars with skulls and skeleton hands, laying among the piles of bones contained within wire netting for preservation. Some of the skulls were not just bone, but mummified corpses with more distinguishable living human features than others.

Some of the bones were easily identifiable such as the pelvis, thigh, and vertebrae; however, there were some that were utterly unrecognizable but were very much human in a way that I cannot put into words. As mangled and repulsive as they looked, I inherently knew that they were a part of something I know, which is my own body. It's a sort of surreal feeling being surrounded by these skeletal fragments because it made me aware that similar pieces of bone are inside me, creating the foundation upon which my existence is formed, and there exists the potential that my skeleton, too, could be deconstructed and displayed in this manner. The fact that human bones have been transformed into such an art is mind-blowing, but the fact that we have such a connection with these forms adorning the crypt, as if parts of our own internal material being are taken out of the bodily context and transformed into architecture, stirred a reaction in me that I'm not even sure what to make of myself. It was an experience of utter horror and shock combined with waves of nausea, and an incredibly deep fascination that I have never felt before.

*Photos are not allowed to be taken inside the Capuchin Crypt. Images courtesy of: Cityseeker, 1+1=3. Demotix, Science Blogs, ABELOG, and Letteratu.it