The Capuchin Crypt and the Roman Origins of Halloween
Issue #109
You may know about (or perhaps have visited) the Catacombs, but did you know that one of the creepiest places in Rome can be found hidden underneath the Church of Santa Maria della Concezione on Via Veneto, the street mainly known for its role in La Dolce Vita? Long before Fellini immortalized the busy thoroughfare as the center of Rome’s hedonistic nightlife, full of revelers and the paparazzi that trailed them, it was home to a very different group of people: the order of Capuchin friars, so-called because of their hooded robes.
In 1631, the period when Baroque art and architecture was flourishing in Rome, the order of Capuchin friars relocated from the friary of St. Bonaventure near the Trevi Fountain to Via Veneto. But unlike most people who move to a new home, they didn’t just bring their furniture and clothing—they also brought the remains of their dead brethren, whose bones they used to decorate their new crypt. That’s right, the crypt is decorated with the skulls and bones of nearly 4,000 friars in elaborate patterns and designs.
The crypt, which stretches for nearly 100 feet, is divided into six different chapels, including the “crypt of skulls.” In one of the chapels, the skeletons of three friars still in their hooded brown robes stand amid the bones in this macabre display. Legend has it that holy soil was brought from Jerusalem for the crypt’s construction. The Capuchins supposedly used to visit the crypt every evening to pray and reflect on their mortality before retiring for the night. A plaque in the crypt proclaims, “What you are now, we once were. What we are, you will one day be.”
The Marquis de Sade, who visited the crypt in 1775, wrote in his journal, “I have never seen anything more striking.” Starting in 1851, tickets to visit the crypt were sold to the public for one week per year: the week following All Souls Day. As of 2022, it’s open to the public everyday except for certain Catholic holidays. Naturally, though, the period surrounding Halloween is a particularly apt time of year to visit.
Though the Capuchin friars created the crypt more than a thousand years after the fall of the Roman Empire, it was the Romans who popularized the festival that later morphed into Halloween when they conquered the Celts and incorporated the Celtic festival of Samhain into their own celebrations. For the ancient Celts, the new year started on November 1st, at the end of the harvest and the beginning of winter, which they associated with death.
According to History.com, “Celts believed that on the night before the new year, the boundary between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. On the night of October 31 they celebrated Samhain, when it was believed that the ghosts of the dead returned to earth.” They celebrated Samhain by building huge sacred bonfires, burning crops and animal sacrifices, and dressing up in costumes (usually animal heads and skins) and attempting to tell each other’s fortunes.
When the Romans conquered the Celts in the early 1st century, they combined Samhain with two of their own festivals: Feralia, a festival in which they commemorated the passing of the dead, and a festival honoring Pomona, the Roman goddess of fruit and trees. This kind of absorption of foreign traditions and festivals into their own was par for the course for the Romans, who expanded their empire so successfully not by eradicating foreign ways of life but by adopting them, allowing many of the people they conquered to join the Roman Empire while keeping their own habits and customs.
The Catholic Church later supplanted these festivals with their own. In 609 CE, Pope Boniface IV created the feast of All Martyrs Day, which was originally celebrated in May, and Pope Gregory later expanded the feast to include not just all martyrs but also all saints and moved the holiday to November 1st. The night before All Saints Day came to be celebrated as All Hallows Eve. So basically, we can thank the Romans for Halloween.
Further Reading
You can read the History.com article I cited above about the history of Halloween here.
For more about the Capuchin Crypt, check out this piece in Atlas Obscura.
Another place I always think about around Halloween is the Sacro Bosco, a mystical sculpture park near Rome, which I wrote about for Nuvo Magazine.
You can find all of the New Roman Times’ coverage of under-the-radar destinations here.
I visited the Capuchin crypt in Palermo, which was creepy enough, but am now keen to discover this structure of bones, too.
This chapel was a favorite childhood “haunt” of mine. I was mesmerized by the intricate decorations created with all the bones, the walls of skulls, the hooded friars. The one that got me most, though, was the bones of a young princess adorning one of the chapel ceilings. In those days there were only a few people who visited. I took my kids one year when they were young but by then it was teeming with tourists, you had to pay to get in, and you were allotted only a few minutes to go through it. It kind of ruined the experience!