Sansevero Chapel Museum
Baroque chapel with a veiled marble Christ and wax-wired anatomical skeletons below.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Sansevero Chapel Museum in Naples takes you down to the basement beneath the nave, where a man and a pregnant woman, reduced to skeleton, are wrapped in a lattice of vessels fine enough to reach their fingertips. For two centuries visitors whispered that Prince Raimondo di Sangro had strapped living servants to a table and hardened their blood into wire, a story the guide traces back through the workshop of a Palermo anatomist named Giuseppe Salerno instead. It also follows a third specimen once kept beside the woman, a skeleton meant to prove she died in childbirth, which vanished from its case sometime in the 1990s and has never turned up. Look closely at the vascular tree over the ribs before you decide which parts of the legend still hold.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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