Dead Central Sicily - Frank McNally on the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo

In Palermo’s strangest tourist attraction, a polite recorded announcement reminds you at regular intervals that the taking of photographs is forbidden.

The rule is not visibly policed. But when I visited last week, nobody dared disobey it. This may be because, everywhere you turned, there were eyes – or at least eye sockets – staring at you.

The Capuchin Catacombs are home to thousands of skeletons and the world’s largest collection of mummies.

The oldest residents are 16th-century friars, whose bodies were preserved instead of buried: first dehydrated on ceramic pipes, then washed in vinegar before being dressed in their robes and displayed for the reflection of living successors.

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Later, from 1783 onwards, posthumous places among the monks became a thing to be desired by Palermitans in general, especially the well-to-do.

They paid to have their remains mounted in the Capuchin crypt, often dressed in their finest suits, and sometimes even arranging for a change of clothes on special occasions.

There was a sort of rent payable, proceeds of which went to the upkeep of the monastery and the friars’ other causes. If the standing order (as it were) lapsed, the skeletons were demoted from vertical to horizontal.

They were also segregated by sex, age, marital status, and vocation. There is a “corridor of the men”, and a separate one for women, families, “virgins”, and priests.

There is also a “corridor of the professionals”: doctors, lawyers, military officers, and artists, all of them well dressed.

Officially, the crypt closed in 1880. But a few celebrities were admitted after that, including in 1911 the American vice-consul Giovanni Paterniti, who was embalmed and whose magnificent handlebar moustache can still be admired.

By the time the practice fully ended a decade or two later, the crypt’s population had expanded to that of a large town. A 2011 census counted 8,000 skeletons and 1,252 mummies, with about 2,000 of the total on display.

The saddest part is the children’s chapel, which includes tiny bodies dressed, and in some cases posed in rocking chairs. But the crypt’s most famous infant forms an exhibition of her own.

Rosalia Lombardo (1918-1920) was also one of the last to enter here. The daughter of a local nobleman, she died of the Spanish Flu a week before her second birthday.

Her heart-broken father commissioned the city’s best embalmer, Alfredo Salafia (whose CV included Paterniti) to preserve her body as if sleeping. The result was so good that, with her blonde curls and rosy cheeks, Rosalia came to be considered the world’s “most beautiful mummy”.

But intentionally or otherwise, Salafia’s work also led to a macabre and long-standing belief that her eyes opened and closed daily. In fact, this was an optical illusion (in more ways than one), caused by changing light conditions.

The truth was unsettling enough. Rosalia’s eyelids are slightly and permanently raised, revealing bright blue eyes.

Salafia brought his professional secrets to the grave. But the formula, rediscovered from his notes in 2009, featured a lot of chemicals, including alcohol to dry the body, glycerin to limit the drying, and formalin and salicylic acid to kill bacteria and fungi respectively.

Good as his job was, Rosalia’s remains did begin to degenerate in later years. They have since been relocated to a drier corner of the crypt and placed under sealed glass with nitrogen gas to prevent further decomposition.

Other celebrities who may be present include the Count of Cagliostro (1743-1795), a self-styled magician who was born in Palermo and became enormously popular and influential throughout Europe, although later denounced as a charlatan and the “Quack of Quacks”.

For the count’s role in the Affair of the Diamond Necklace (1784-5), a scandal that engulfed Marie Antoinette, Napoleon credited him with causing the French Revolution.

But if he is in the Capuchin crypt, he must be hiding. When Bonaparte inquired after him on his own visit there circa 1806, the magician could not be found.

There is nothing magical about the visible exhibits. Except for the poster child (her face adorns postcards and booklets in the small shop outside the entrance, the only commercialisation of the site apart from the modest €3 admission), the inmates all look extremely dead and unlikely to haunt anyone soon.

Most are also fighting a doomed battle with gravity. The standing skeletons have shrunk into themselves, making even adults look tiny, and many jaws have dropped alarmingly.

In a few cases, the result suggests the person died laughing. But the overall effect is deeply sombre, as the founding friars intended. It’s a relief to climb the stairs again, back into the land of the living and the blinding sunlight of Piazza Cappuccini.