Let’s talk about bones! Have you ever wondered what it would look like if someone took bones from 4,000 people and decorated a few rooms with them? Yea, me neither, but if exists, why not go and see it?!
There is a church in Rome, in Barberini square to be exact, that has the bones of 4,000 of its monks decorating the walls of a number of crypts. When you hear about catacombs in Rome, you will, for some reason, almost always see photos of these crypts. This is actually what you think you will see when you go to the catacombs, where there aren’t many visible bones.
This is a really creepy scene. It’s very hard to summarize the experience here because, even when you see pictures of the crypts beforehand, it is difficult to take in the whole experience of seeing things like jawbones put together to form a kind of rectangle on the wall, bone chandeliers that have been recently wired for electricity, mounds of skulls, a clock made of hand bones but without a ‘hand’ to tell time, a small child skeleton hanging from the ceiling, a coat of arms made with real arms, and more.
This is a relatively small exhibit so it doesn’t take long to go through it. Each crypt that you go through gets progressively more odd and creepy. Looking at everything will really take your breath away. It is a really interesting exhibit though; so, you should definitely make time to go to this exhibit and just look around in each crypt and take-in all of the decorations.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this is that Cappuccino is named after the capuchin monks, whose bones decorate these crypts. Cappuccino was apparently invented right across the street from these crypts and the inventor saw one of these monks walking around and thought he kind of looked like a Cappuccino and so named it after them.
So, the next time you order a cappuccino, maybe you should ask for it in a skull!
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