Cimitero delle Fontanelle
Cave ossuary holding forty thousand anonymous skulls once adopted and named by grieving strangers.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Cimitero delle Fontanelle in Naples starts inside a former tuff quarry outside the city, where forty thousand unclaimed skulls piled up after the plague of 1656 and the cholera epidemic of 1836. It follows Father Gaetano Barbati, who finally organized the chaos into rows in 1872, and the Neapolitan women who then adopted individual skulls, the capuzzella, naming them from dreams and setting them on embroidered cloth with candles and flowers. They prayed for the soul trapped inside, one of the pezzentelle nobody else remembered.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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