Inside Rome’s catacombs, a hidden world of history and faith

This article is part of a new FT Globetrotter series on Spooky Cities. It is also part of our guide to Rome

As the global seat of the Catholic faith, Rome boasts churches holding some of the greatest masterpieces of western art, from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel to the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, with its three Caravaggio paintings.  

But not all of the city’s sacred spaces inspire awe through grandeur. One in particular evokes a chilling sense of foreboding: the macabre Capuchin Crypt, artfully decorated with the bones of more than 3,700 deceased Capuchin friars in an eerie yet powerful testament to the fleeting nature of human existence. 

Created in the 18th century inside a Capuchin convent beneath the Church of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini, the ossuary consists of six small rooms, with names such as the Crypt of the Skulls, the Crypt of Tibias and Femurs, and the Crypt of the Resurrection.

There, the skulls and bones of deceased friars — who lived as far back as the early 16th century — are piled into arches and altar-like structures, and the walls and ceilings are adorned with bones arrayed in complex patterns, including floral motifs, evocative of Rome’s Baroque churches. Bones have even been fashioned into chandeliers.

“What you are now, we used to be; what we are now, you will be,” reads a handwritten-looking sign in the Crypt of the Three Skeletons, one of which belongs to a child who now looms above visitors from the ceiling, holding bones put together to resemble the scythe of death. 

In a city most commonly associated with la dolce vita, the crypt’s grisly displays are deeply jarring, especially given its location at the bottom of Via Vittorio Veneto, the elegant street that epitomised the glamour and vivacity of “Swinging Rome” during the heyday of Italy’s postwar boom in the 1950s and ’60s. 

Yet underneath its dazzling beauty, Rome is a city that was historically preoccupied with human mortality, given the Catholic focus on the transience of earthly existence and the promised resurrection of Christ’s faithful followers in the afterlife.   

Today, visitors with morbid interests — or the merely curious — can explore this darker aspect of Rome, while peeling back some of the layers of its more than 2,000-year history, starting from a time when burying human remains was strictly prohibited within the ancient walls that surrounded the Eternal City. 

The Capuchin Crypt is undoubtedly the most ghoulish of Rome’s gloomy offerings, its use of human bones intended to be the ultimate in memento mori — the ancient Latin injunction to people to “remember you must die”. The crypts are also inhabited by various intact human skeletons and mummified monks still clad in the rough, brown hooded robes of their order — creepy enough to send shivers down any spine.  

More squeamish visitors — or those seeking a less direct confrontation with the face of death — can instead explore some of Rome’s ancient catacombs, the labyrinthine subterranean cemeteries outside the old city, where the earliest Christians were buried while awaiting what they expected to be their imminent resurrection. 

No bones or skeletons are on display in these underground warrens, used by early Christians as cemeteries — or “dormitories” for the dead — between the second and fifth centuries, and treated as important religious pilgrimage sites centuries after that.

Eventually, after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire and human burials were finally permitted within the city, the remains of important early Christian spiritual leaders — popes, martyrs and saints — were transferred to churches in the city to better protect them.

After their abandonment, Rome’s catacombs were repeatedly looted, first by foreign invaders, then by canny locals active in the booming medieval trade in ostensibly sacred relics, or the market in antique art demanded by upper-class Brits undertaking the Grand Tour of Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The catacombs are now supervised by the Vatican’s Pontifical Commission for Sacred Archaeology, which considers them sacred grounds, and has entrusted the day-to-day management of the sites to different religious orders. But the sites are not nearly as popular or busy as Rome’s above-ground splendours, so visits there can feel off-the-beaten path or a journey of private discovery, away from the madding crowds.

Inside the dark, cool and rather clammy tunnels lie tens of thousands of emptied burial chambers, so-called loculi, including tiny ones for babies and children, stacked closely atop one another. 

Wandering through these corridors offers a haunting peek into the world — life, death and faith — of early Christians as they developed their religious iconography and distinctive funeral rites, even as they initially continued the pagan custom of funeral meals with the dead (dining next to bodies on the day of the burial and on death anniversaries).

These days, visitors grouped by language are shepherded around the subterranean labyrinths by knowledgable guides whose dual role is to explain the sites and make sure no one gets lost in the long, winding tunnels.  

Tones are respectful and informative, with opportunities to review the relics of a vanished age: small terracotta oil lamps once used to illuminate the tunnels; early Christian symbols such as fish, doves, anchors and the monogram for Christ etched into the walls; Latin inscriptions and historic graffiti from Renaissance archeologists and 18th-century art smugglers; fragments of beautifully carved marble sarcophagi used by wealthier families; and surviving frescoes from the birth of Christian art, including people praying with open arms outstretched to God, and a woman with a child on her lap, which my guide suggested could have been the earliest-known Madonna and Child.

Most human bones that remain on the sites have been reburied in lower levels, off limits to the public.

While the catacombs all have much in common and may seem pretty similar, each has its own distinctive features — or story — that sets it apart from the others, and descending into one or more offers glimpses of the tides of history, and how the earliest Christians lived with death.

What lies beneath: seven of Rome’s most fascinating catacombs and crypts

During the Roman empires, authorities prohibited the burial of human bodies within the city walls for public health reasons. Today, three of the Roman catacombs open to the public are clustered around the old Appia Antica, or Appian Way, the ancient road out of Rome heading to southern Italy. These are all within short walking distance of one another, making it easy to visit more than one on a visit.

The Catacomb of Saint Callixtus is the slickest — and busiest — of them all. The one-time burial ground for many early popes and Christian martyrs like St Cecilia — for which it earned the moniker of “The Little Vatican” — is today artfully lit, with church music piped into the tunnels. It still has many ancient frescoes, including a ninth-century portrait of a bearded Jesus called “Christ the Teacher” by an unknown artist. But the crowds make them feel like a major spot on Rome’s tourism circuit.

Nearby, the Catacombs of Saint Sebastian and Domitilla are far quieter, and less dressed up for visitors, offering more intimate experiences. At Saint Sebastian, visitors emerging from underground can see several decorated pagan mausoleums, a sharp contrast with the humble burial style of the early Christians. 

The Catacomb of Domitilla, which began as the burial ground of a noble Roman family, two of whom converted to Christianity, also retains some elements of its pagan origins, creating a complex historical site. My guide also provided fascinating insights into the looting of the catacombs after their abandonment by the Church, even explaining how art thieves could literally cut the frescoes out of the walls for sale.

The Catacombs of Saints Marcellinus and Peter, a priest and an exorcist respectively, are dedicated to two men were venerated as martyrs by the Church after they were beheaded in the fourth century. The site was a popular pilgrimage destination for centuries after their deaths, and today visitors can see the underground chapel where their bodies once lay. Other cubicles have breathtaking ancient frescoes, some on Old Testament subjects, including Noah’s ark and Jonah and the whale, which early Christians considered a prophecy for Christ’s resurrection. Others are from New Testament stories such as Christ and the bleeding woman, as well as images of Christ the Shepherd and other symbols evoking paradise and eternal life.

Across town on Via Salaria, the Catacomb of Priscilla, opposite the sprawling Villa Ada park, is sometimes called the “Queen of the Catacombs” and it’s known for its stunning frescoes, including a portrait of a woman at three key stages of her life, a painting of a strong, toga-clad Jesus carrying a ram across his shoulders and what is perhaps the earliest portrait of a Madonna and Child in Christian art history.

The nearby Catacomb of Saint Agnes is the smallest of Rome’s catacombs that are open to the public. It has no surviving frescoes, and despite the virtue of being adjacent to a metro station, gets so few visitors that scheduled tours sometimes do not take place, as guides cannot leave with fewer than two visitors.

Finally, the aforementioned Capuchin Crypt is not for the faint-hearted, despite a well-produced audio guide and a museum that sets the context for the crypt with information about the Capuchin order, their spiritual approach and their attitude towards death as merely the way station to the glories of eternal life. 

For those of little faith, however, the experience of a visit can be deeply unsettling. The intensity of it all led me to feel queasy as soon as I entered, and struggled to sleep that night after what I’d seen. Be warned.

Have you explored Rome’s catacombs and crypts? Share your experiences in the comments below. And follow us on Instagram at @ftglobetrotter

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