Expensive Decor

This is what I call living art. Capuchin crypt on Via Veneto (where Fellini used to hang out, featured in La Dolce Vita outdoor restaurant scenes)  with its crypts entirely decorated by arranging human bones. It’s a shocking sight, but nevertheless beautiful. The details are just mind blowing.

When the monks arrived at the church in 1631, they brought 300 cartloads of deceased friars. Fr. Michael of Bergamo oversaw the arrangement of the bones in the burial crypt. The soil in the crypt was brought from Jerusalem, by order of Pope Urban VIII.

As monks died during the lifetime of the crypt, the longest-buried monk was exhumed to make room for the newly-deceased who was buried without a coffin, and the newly-reclaimed bones were added to the decorative motifs. Bodies typically spent 30 years decomposing in the soil, before being exhumed