The Capuchin Crypt in Rome: Whose Bones They Are and What the Message Says

The crypt is part of the Museo e Cripta dei Cappuccini, and you reach it by walking through the museum's exhibition rooms. The convent and church were begun in 1626 under Pope Urban VIII Barberini and Cardinal Antonio Barberini, and the plans came from a Capuchin friar, Michele da Bergamo. The friars moved into the new convent on April 16, 1631, and they brought the remains of their dead with them from the cemetery of the former San Bonaventura convent. The museum itself opened in 2012.

The museum describes the crypt as a religious burial site and a *memento mori*, a deliberate prompt to reflect on mortality, spiritual life and eternity.

The museum gives the figure as about 3,700 deceased people, mostly Capuchin friars who died in Rome. Other descriptions round upward. Rome's tourism office says nearly 4,000, Italy's Ministry of Culture describes about 4,000 friars who died between the sixteenth century and 1870, and an architectural guide offers a range of 3,500 to 4,000. For a number to repeat, "about 3,700" is the museum's own.

The collection is not a list of named monks. Many of the remains are unidentified, and the museum's own wording is "mostly Capuchin friars." A few burials are named. The Mass Chapel holds the heart of Maria Felice Peretti, who died in 1656, and the burial of Giuseppe Matteo Orsini, who died in 1660. Some complete skeletons are displayed in Capuchin habits, and the rest of the bones form the decoration.

The museum describes six connected spaces, one of them the chapel used for Mass. Their Italian names are worth knowing, because they appear on signs and in guides.

• Crypt of the Three Skeletons (*Cripta dei tre scheletri*): three young skeletons, floral bone decoration, a central figure associated with a scythe and scales, and memorial inscriptions.
• Crypt of the Tibias and Femurs (*Cripta delle tibie e dei femori*): arrangements dominated by leg bones, with skulls, arches, capitals, floral motifs and crosses made of vertebrae.
• Crypt of the Pelvises (*Cripta dei bacini*): pelvises, vertebrae and long bones forming bands, stars, a central rosette and crosses.
• Crypt of the Skulls (*Cripta dei teschi*): skull decoration, standing and reclining friar skeletons, and a winged hourglass that stands for time.
• Mass Chapel (*Cappella per la messa*): the chapel used for Masses for the dead, with an altarpiece of Mary and the Child with souls in purgatory.
• Crypt of the Resurrection (*Cripta della resurrezione*): bone-framed arrangements around a painting of the Resurrection of Lazarus, which stands for resurrection and eternal life.

Some older descriptions use "Crypt of the Leg Bones" or reverse the order of the rooms, so a guidebook may not match the museum's current labels.

The inscription is the line most visitors remember. Italy's Ministry of Culture quotes it as *"Noi eravamo come voi e voi sarete come noi"*, "We were as you are, and you will be as we are." Other named Italian descriptions of the church give a closely related wording:

> *"Quello che voi siete noi eravamo; quello che noi siamo voi sarete."* > "What you are, we once were; what we are, you will be."

Both say the same thing. Human life is temporary, and the living and the dead share the same mortality. The museum describes the crypt as a place to reflect on the transience of earthly life and the eternity of the spirit, and the Crypt of the Resurrection, with its painting of Lazarus rising, sets the message inside a Christian frame of death, judgment and hoped-for resurrection. The friars are speaking to the visitor as people who were once alive in the same way.

Nobody can say exactly when the bone decorations were made or who made them. The museum records several hypotheses and says documentary certainty is lacking, so it is best to describe the arrangements as Capuchin decoration associated with the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and to leave out any named designer. What is known is that the decoration already existed when the Marquis de Sade visited in 1775.

De Sade's account, as quoted by the museum, credits *"un sacerdote tedesco di questa casa"*, "a German priest of this house," with creating *"un monumento funebre degno di un ingegno inglese"*, "a funerary monument worthy of an English genius." That is how one visitor described the maker in 1775, and it is a description, not a record.

Mark Twain visited Rome on the trip he published in 1869 as *The Innocents Abroad*. In Chapter 28 he wrote that the Capuchin convent had "six divisions" decorated with human bones, and he described arches made from thigh bones, pyramids of skulls and designs made of vertebrae. A friar in his account told him the remains were those of "four thousand" monks. That is a nineteenth-century traveler's report, and the museum's modern figure is lower.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's *The Marble Faun* (1860) has a fictionalized Capuchin cemetery in Chapter 21, "The Dead Capuchin," with a friar laid out in his habit and bone-built arches beneath the church. It is a novel, not a travel report.

As listed on the museum's official ticket page on October 5, 2026, the address is Via Vittorio Veneto 27, 00187 Rome. The crypt is visited only as part of the combined museum and crypt admission, with no crypt-only ticket. The museum is open daily from 09:30 to 13:30 and from 14:30 to 18:30, with last entry at 12:30 and 17:30, and it estimates about 60 minutes for the full visit. A full ticket was €10 and a reduced ticket €6.50, both with an audio guide, and a group ticket for ten or more was €7.50. Online tickets added a €1.50 fee, children aged six and under and qualifying disabled visitors entered free, and the museum did not accept the Roma Pass, MiC Card, ICOM Card or Turbo Pass. A ticket permits one entry.

The crypt is a sacred place, so shoulders and legs must be covered to the knees. Large bags and suitcases go in the free lockers. Under the museum's current rules, private non-commercial photography and video are permitted, while anything meant for publication or commercial use needs authorization from the Fondo Edifici di Culto. Prices and rules change, so confirm them on the museum's own page before you go.

The Capuchins are one of several communities that keep their dead in plain view. The skull chapel of Sedlec in Czechia, the quarry ossuary of the Paris Catacombs and the places on the list of ossuaries around the world each tell that story in a different way. The idea they share is memento mori, and its roots in the Christian tradition are covered in skulls in Christianity. The same thought sits behind our Memento Mori skull tee.