The Church of the Bones
Roman monuments: the Church of Santa Maria Immacolata, decorated with the bones of 4000 Capuchin friars. The Church of Santa Maria Immacolata is located in via Veneto 27 and is a decidedly unusual place. It was built between 1626 and 1631 at the behest of Pope Urban VIII, in honor of his brother Antonio Barberini who was part of the order of the Capuchin friars.
The crypt-ossuary of the church is decorated with the bones of over 4,000 friars, with skulls and bones on the walls and ceiling, skeletons of friars in habit leaning against the walls, crosses on the ground and many other symbols related to death.
The church was designed by Michele da Bergamo and is also famous for some beautiful works. In fact, important paintings adorn the chapels, such as the Archangel Michael chasing Lucifer by Guido Reni, the Nativity by Giovanni Lanfranco, the San Francesco receiving the stigmata, by Domenichino, the Transfiguration by Mario Balassi.
The vault was frescoed in 1796 by the neoclassical painter Liborio Coccetti, with the theme of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. In the sacristy, now a museum, various works of art and sacred objects related to the Capuchins are preserved, including a painting of St. Francis in meditation, recently attributed to Caravaggio, which further increases the importance of the site.
But what arouses curiosity in the many tourists who visit it is above all the crypt, a real attraction, a rather ghostly and apparently macabre place, which retains a very particular decoration and for Rome decidedly original.
The crypt welcomes the visitor with the phrase “What you are we were; what we are you will be “.
The bones were collected between 1528 and 1870 from the old cemetery of the Capuchin order, which was located in the church of Santa Croce and San Bonaventura dei Lucchesi near the Quirinale. The crypt is divided into five small chapels, where there are also some entire bodies of some mummified friars wearing the typical robes of the Capuchin friars.
The choice of decorating the crypt with bones, which could appear eerie and macabre, is actually a way of exorcising death and of underlining how the body is nothing but a container for the soul, and as such once it is there ‘has abandoned the container can be reused in another way.
