The Capuchin Crypt: Chapels of Bones
Why is it significant?
Climb to the church at the top of the double staircase, Santa Maria della Concezione, and before you go anywhere else, look at the floor in front of the main altar. There is a plain tombstone with no name on it, only a few Latin words: here lies dust, ashes and nothing.
Key Facts
| Place | The Capuchin Crypt: Chapels of Bones |
|---|---|
| Address | Via Vittorio Veneto 27, 00187 Roma RM, Italy |
| Geo Coordinates | 41.90480, 12.48860 |
| Part of Walk | Rivals on the Quirinal: Bernini vs Borromini in Baroque Rome |
| Generated | Generated |
Climb to the church at the top of the double staircase, Santa Maria della Concezione, and before you go anywhere else, look at the floor in front of the main altar. There is a plain tombstone with no name on it, only a few Latin words: here lies dust, ashes and nothing.
That stone covers Cardinal Antonio Barberini, the brother of Pope Urban the Eighth, the man of the bees. Unlike the rest of his family, Antonio was a Capuchin friar, a member of a strict and barefoot branch of the Franciscans, and he had this church built for his order between 1626 and 1631. In a family that put its emblem on every fountain in Rome, he chose to have his name on nothing at all.
Now go down to the crypt beneath. You walk along a corridor past six small chapels, and every single surface, the walls, the arches, the lamps hanging from the ceiling, is made of human bones. Skulls stacked into niches. Pelvises arranged into rosettes. Shoulder blades fanned out like wings. Vertebrae strung into garlands. Some skeletons stand in their brown habits, still wearing them.
The bones belong to around three thousand seven hundred people, most of them friars, collected over several centuries. When the Capuchins moved here, they brought the remains of their brothers from their old convent. The story goes that the earth in the chapels was brought from Jerusalem. It is not meant to be macabre. It is meant to be a sermon. A sign in the last chapel says it plainly: what you are now, we once were; what we are now, you will be.
Mark Twain came here and wrote about it in The Innocents Abroad, with a mixture of horror and very dark comedy. After the crypt, it is hard to look at Bernini's exuberant fountains in quite the same way. That is rather the point. Now walk back down to Piazza Barberini and turn up the slope of Via delle Quattro Fontane to the great palace on your left.