Capuchin Catacombs (Photos.com/ThinkStock)

Long eyelashes. Plump cheeks. Curly, blonde hair topped with a cheerful, yellow ribbon. These features belong to little Rosalia Lombardo, whose well-preserved frame has lain in Sicily’s Capuchin Catacombs for decades. In her tiny, glass-topped coffin, Rosalia looks like she’s sleeping, but she died nearly 100 years ago at age 2, and if you venture beneath the streets of Palermo to see her, you’ll also run into about 8,000 of her closest corpse pals.

Ghoulish as that scene may sound, the origins of the Capuchin Catacombs were actually quite benign. They started out in the 16th century as a kind of underground cemetery for deceased friars of the Capuchin Monastery above. The monks actually discovered by accident that, thanks to the presence of tufa stone in the area, bodies buried there underwent a kind of natural mummification. Pretty soon, other folks wanted their loved ones laid to rest in the catacombs, too, so now when you visit the site, you’ll find the 4,300-square-foot space divided up into separate sections for men, women, virgins, children, monks and professionals.

Most are wearing the finest clothes they owned in life, many still have their hair, and some have a few other discernable features, too. Of all these mummies, though, Rosalia’s body — sometimes referred to as “Sleeping Beauty” — is most intact. According to National Geographic, that’s because a Sicilian taxidermist and embalmer named Alfredo Salafia injected the toddler with a special solution containing ingredients like alcohol to help mummify her, formalin to kill bacteria, and — the key addition — zinc salts, which petrified her.

To me, the idea of walking through an underground cavern full of corpses, no matter what stage of decay they’re in, sounds decidedly eerie. But Sicilians who put their loved ones in Capuchin Catacombs didn’t feel that way. For them, this was a way to keep special people around to visit and pray with, allowing them a kind of new life after their lives had ended, which travelers can speculate about today. Speculate, but not emulate, as the catacombs stopped being used in the 18th century, with Rosalia, who died in 1920, being the last, angelic exception.

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