Pilgrim of the dead

In Rome, the sky was a muted gray, the façades of buildings rain-washed and damp. My husband and I had arrived at the Cemetery of the Capuchins, what promised to be an above-ground crypt tended by Capuchin monks. I had expected to see an interesting variant of mausoleum or graveyard -- perhaps an indoor graveyard, with plastic Astroturf and dusty silk flowers.

We were standing outside the monastery doors, in the misting rain, because of a little anecdote my husband had shared the day before about the origin of the word "cappuccino" (as in, "I'll have a grande cappuccino, low-fat milk, please"). We had stood together over espressos in a tiny cafi as he told me that Capuchin monks shave a neat bald circle in the exact center of their hair, and that Italian locals have long joked that the result -- a ring of dark hair framing a white shaved spot of skin -- looks uncannily like foamy white milk encircled by the brown stain of espresso. Hence the word cappuccino.

"I'm not falling for it," I said. "You're joking." He's been known to tell tall tales before.

"I'm not," he insisted, and that is how we found ourselves huddled against the wet walls of the Capuchin monastery the next morning, waiting to be let in. Eventually, a monk in a brown wool frock (tied with a rope -- a real rope!) met us at the door, and I was chagrined to find that his hair did in fact look amazingly like the cappuccinos we had enjoyed at yesterday's cafe.

With a stiff wave, the monk solemnly directed us into a winding stairwell topped by a darkened passage. We emerged into a tiny room painted sky blue. I sucked in my breath as I took in the sight before me. Bones -- a panoramic display of bones had been positioned in flat, elaborate patterns adorning the walls, floor and ceiling. The yellow-brown scapulae and vertebrae, fibulae and tibiae, arranged so artfully against the blue plaster, reminded me of old, yellowing lace held up against the sky.

A worn velvet rope forced us into single file, our backs against a wall, the rope the only thing separating us from the sight ahead of and above us. Against two walls, shelves had been erected to hold the skeletal, decomposing remains of monks dressed in their frocks, appearing to rest at ease, clutching wooden crosses as tough, aged flesh dangled from withered fingers. On the floor, dirt mounds imitated graves, but the occupants were surely not buried. Instead, they had been disassembled and their skeletons scattered and arranged among the rest, disappearing anonymously into the design that crept over this elaborate spectacle.

And the design was paramount. It covered everything, every surface, creating spiral and angular shapes, patterns reminiscent of flowers and paisleys, an artist's doodle pad. Even the hallway's hanging chandeliers had been made from the more delicate bones of the human form. I felt as if I were being cradled in a womb of death, with the swirling walls, floor and ceiling forcing the spectacle of my own mortality into my face, a veritable rounded crystal ball of bones with myself as the future in its center.

Each of the tight, adjoining and highly decorated rooms led to another, finally landing us in a chamber with the most grisly motif of all. No longer abstract, the patterns instead reflected haunting images of mortality meant to be stamped in the unwary tourist's mind. Upon the ceiling, replicated in meticulous detail, was a carefully crafted figure of the Grim Reaper: His bone face was a human skull, and the blade of his scythe was composed of an elegantly descending column of coccyges that tapered realistically into a sharpened edge. Near him, the visage of an ancient clock with Roman numerals, completely formed of bones, symbolically ticked away man's time.

I emerged from the Capuchin cemetery shaken, horrified, but gripped with even greater curiosity. Were there other places like this, I wondered, or had I stumbled into a singular anomaly? Perhaps the Capuchins, I theorized, with their emphases on poverty and austerity, had at one time found burial wasteful and expensive. Perhaps a lunatic monk had created this site in a fit of manic inspiration, and now the brothers felt obliged to tend this sacred cow rather than dismantle it. Perhaps there was something about Catholicism that I just didn't know. Perhaps it was explained in a book somewhere, but then again, perhaps it was simply up to me to make my own meaning, as I had already done.

Next Page: Why are we fascinated by bones?

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