One of the most fascinating and mysterious places in Rome is the Crypt of the Capuchin Friars on Via Veneto, in the basement of the Church of Santa Maria della Concezione. It is a true “work of macabre art,” decorated with the bones of 4,000 Capuchin friars who died between 1500 and 1800. A funerary monument created in the mid-18th century by an unknown artist, who littered the Crypt’s six chapels with symbols of memento mori (a Latin warning that literally means “remember that you must die”), all made from human bones, including bone clocks and winged hourglasses, symbols of the inevitability of human life, and a skeleton holding a scythe in one hand and scales in the other, representing the inevitability of death and divine justice. On the walls are piled thousands of shinbones, skulls and femurs to create altars, niches, arches and other architectural structures manned by creepy skeletons dressed in Franciscan habit, menacingly awaiting the visitor. Some chapels are characterized by the prevalent use of a particular bone and bear its name: the Chapel of the Tibias and Femurs, the Chapel of the Basins, and the Chapel of the Skulls. The vault of the Crypt is also sumptuously decorated with human bones: chandeliers of vertebrae, flowers, stars and crosses of tibiae and fibulae, butterflies of phalanges and coccyges, rosettes and pilasters of ribs and clavicles.
The entrance to the Crypt is surmounted by an unmistakable inscription, “What you are we were; what we are you will be.” This exceptional guided tour then continues to the adjacent Museum, which tells the story of the order and whose eight rooms are housed in what was originally the Capuchin Convent attached to the Baroque church of Santa Maria della Concezione. The exhibition itinerary, which features paintings, manuscripts, sacred objects and liturgical vestments, culminates with a masterpiece: Caravaggio’s St. Francis in Meditation, painted by Merisi in 1606 especially for the Capuchin Convent.