The House of the Dead

Before we left Palermo we spent a further day sightseeing with Rosemary, including a visit to the Convento dei Capucinni, a large catacombs where about 8,000 of the great and the good of Palermo have literally been hung out to dry. Most of the bodies date from the 18th and 19th centuries and have been embalmed, put into their Sunday best and then hung up in niches around the catacombs. Some of the bodies still have flesh on them, like dried parchment, while others are just skeletons. The result is a bizarre social history of the dress of middle class Sicilians over two centuries. Far from being creepy or horrifying the catacombs seemed curiously tame, maybe we’ve become so used to super-real Hollywood special effects that reality is becoming increasingly anti-climactic.