The Palermo Catacombs: Who Rests With the Capuchins and How to Visit

The story starts with the friars themselves. According to the catacombs' official history of their origin, the Capuchins settled at Santa Maria della Pace in Palermo in 1534. By 1597 their cemetery had grown too small, so they dug a larger one behind the altar of the church.

When the friars exhumed the old burials in 1599, they uncovered 45 bodies that had mummified naturally. The friars read that preservation as divine intervention, and they placed their brothers on display in the new cemetery. The first was Fra Silvestro da Gubbio, set in the catacomb on 16 October 1599.

Word spread through the city. People came to see the friars, and in time many of them wanted to rest in the same place.

What began as a friars' cemetery opened to the city in stages. The official history says that in 1783 the Capuchins formally allowed burial for anyone who asked for it. In practice, the process was expensive, so the people who ended up in the corridors were mostly wealthy citizens, clergy, professionals and members of prominent families.

The cemetery was closed in 1880. A few exceptional burials followed: Giovanni Paterniti in 1911 and Rosalia Lombardo, a little girl, in 1920.

That long span is part of what makes the collection important to scientists. The bioanthropologists Dario Piombino-Mascali, Luca Sineo, Barbara Manachini, Giuseppe Carotenuto, Albert Zink and Franco Palla describe it, in their 2008 paper on the Palermo Capuchin Catacombs Project, as a modern collection of human mummies dating broadly from the 16th to the 20th centuries. Some three centuries of Palermo's dead rest in one place.

Most of the people in the catacombs were preserved by drying. The catacombs' page on the mummification process describes how it worked. A body was first laid in a preparation room called a colatoio. The internal organs were removed and replaced with straw or bay leaves, and the body was set on a grid of terracotta tubes so that fluids could drain away.

The room was then kept closed for nearly a year, in dry conditions with little humidity. After that the remains were exposed to the air, washed with vinegar, dressed and placed in niches in the walls. The clothing you see today comes from that last step, the friars in their habits and the laypeople in the clothes they were dressed in.

Not every body went through the same treatment. The official site records arsenic baths during epidemics and occasional chemical embalming. Scientists have since looked closely at which methods were used on whom. In a 2010 study, Stephanie Panzer, Albert Zink and Dario Piombino-Mascali used radiology and CT scans to tell natural mummification from deliberate, human-made treatment. A CT study showed that preservation varies a great deal from one person to another, and even between different parts of the same body.

Piombino-Mascali has spent years with this collection. His ORCID profile identifies him as the scientific curator and head of the Sicily Mummy Project. If you want to know how bodies can dry rather than decay, the Guanajuato mummies in Mexico are another well-known case of natural preservation.

The catacombs are organized the way the city once organized itself. The official site says the bodies were arranged by profession, sex and social status, and each corridor or chapel has its own group.

The corridor of the Capuchin friars is the oldest section, and the friars there wear their religious habits. Clergy in priestly regalia rest in a separate priests' hall. The women's corridor holds women in embroidered clothing and ornamental caps, and the men's corridor holds members of prominent Palermo families. There is a children's chapel for the young, and a family corridor where relatives rest together in groups.

The corridor of professionals gathers doctors, lawyers, painters, officers and soldiers. The official site names several of them: the painter Velasquez, the sculptors Filippo Pennino and Lorenzo Marabitti, and the surgeon Salvatore Manzella. A chapel known as the Crucifix holds young unmarried women, whom the site describes as virgins.

Walking through, you see a social history of Palermo, laid out corridor by corridor by the friars who kept it.

There is no single number, because different counts measure different things. The official site speaks of thousands of burials. Scientific papers count the preserved mummies: a microbial survey of the catacombs reports more than 1,200 of them, and a 2011 EURAC count is commonly cited as 1,252 mummies. An academic volume describes more than 1,200 mummies and 600 coffins. A larger figure of about 8,000 human remains appears in municipal and travel material.

Those figures are not interchangeable. A mummy count, a coffin count and a count of all remains, including skeletal ones, answer different questions. If you need an exact current figure, the catacombs' curators are the people to ask.

The best-known person in the catacombs is a child. Rosalia Lombardo was a two-year-old Palermo child who died in 1920. She was embalmed by Alfredo Salafia and rests in a nitrogen-filled case in the catacombs. Her story, and the questions people ask about her, are told in full in our story on Rosalia Lombardo.

People also mix up Palermo with Rome, since both belong to the Capuchins. The Rome tourism authority describes the Capuchin Crypt beneath Santa Maria della Concezione on Via Veneto as a set of chapels where the bones of roughly 4,000 Capuchin friars are arranged as decoration. Palermo is different: a former cemetery where friars and laypeople rest as preserved, dressed bodies along corridors. For the Roman chapels, read our story on the Capuchin Crypt, and for the city's older underground burials, the catacombs of Rome.

The official timetable, as listed on 25 October 2026, gives the same hours from Monday through Sunday:

• Morning: 9:00 to 12:30, with last entry at 12:10.
• Afternoon: 15:00 to 17:30, with last entry at 17:10.

The official ticket page lists a full ticket at €5 and a reduced ticket at €3. Groups are asked to reserve by telephone at +39 091 6527389. Holidays can change the schedule, so confirm the hours on the official site before you travel on a holiday.

Inside, the admission rules prohibit photography, filming and touching the exhibits. The site gives two reasons, conservation and bioethics: the remains need protecting, and they are real people. It is the same courtesy you would show at any family grave.

A few more answers for anyone planning a visit or still thinking about those photographs.

Palermo is one of many places where communities kept their dead close. Elsewhere in southern Italy, read about the Fontanelle Cemetery in Naples. Bone houses such as the Sedlec Ossuary and the many sites in ossuaries around the world show other ways of gathering remains together.

Two other stories in this series stay close to the same idea. At St Catherine's Monastery in Sinai, monks still move their brothers' bones into a charnel house, and at the Solferino ossuary in northern Italy, the soldiers of an 1859 battle rest together in a memorial chapel.

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