Fontanelle Cemetery Caves

Fri, Feb 12, 2010

The cemetery turned cave is not only interesting but unusual and bizarre since a place like this is unlikely to be found anywhere else in the world. It is situated under many layers of dirt in Sanita, Naples is this charnel house, a Golgotha, an ossuary, filled with a vast collection of skeleton remains dating years back in history. Though back in the Roman Empire era, the area close to this region to the north was accustomed to rituals and death, even though they had their own carved out cavern, nothing like the Fontanelle cemetery caves.

The occupation of these cemeteries started once when the Spanish settled in by the early 1500s, they soon were to be encountered by the problem where to bury their dead, options arose of burying them outskirts or the city but this did not sit well with the Neapolitans since they wanted to be interred by the churches which they had been worshipping in for many years. Therefore undertakers started to make space for the new burials and shifted the old dead outside the city which one day would be known as the Fontanelle cemetery. More anonymous bodies were to be followed after this creation by the 1656, great year of plague of that century. It was estimated that 40,000 bodies were incinerated in the caves.

Somewhere in the 1600s a flood was experienced which devastatingly washed out the graves flooding the street of Sanita, it was a gruesome and grisly sight to see bodies and bones laid across the roads, dismantled. They were returned back to the caves. It was not the end to the line of dead which were to be experienced; the last catastrophic disaster was inhabited by the epidemic cholera which took place in the 1837.

Than in 1872, Father Gaetano Barbati took the honorable and huge step of organizing the dead, categorizing the chaotic spread of hundreds and hundreds of bodies lay unhampered and untended. He started off by storing them in makeshift crypts, in boxes and on wooden racks. These lost souls were finally put to rest and as volunteers performed the righteous ritual of burial they offered payers of peace and rest to the dead. So as to free their souls off this punishment which they had been entrapped wrongfully for years and years. They were visited by superstitious women who would talk to them in times of tough and hardship would ask favors and bring trinkets and flowers to make their souls happy and loved by someone.

Apart from using it as a cemetery it was unfortunately used a bomb shelter in times of the bomb raids of WW2. After the WW2 the devotion and worshipping of the skeletons and the dead increased amongst the woman. This was followed by regular display and offerings of flowers, and other items. Women were strangely left to believe that if the dead were kept happy their wishes could be fulfilled. Since so many of these depressed and lost souls had no permanent home, by contracting one they believe that they have made the dead happy.

This place became a popular site for making out, for those who were bewitched by the intrigues of black magic and then there were those who most sought skill of fortune telling skill was of a skull with the gift for lotto numbers. In order to save the caves from curses and haunting a church was built, Maria Santissima del Carmine, but even after construction it was paid no heed upon.

This cult was devoted out of love, which cared and adopted them when their own couldn’t recognize them. Their love and commitment only lasted till the mid of 20th century when all of a sudden. Cardinal Ursi of Naples decided that this devotion and worship of the dead had to be stopped and this paganism had to be famished and so he ordered to close the cemetery down. The recent developments have started during 2000-2004 for restoration of the caves and reinforce the structure to stronger stance.

Technorati Tags: interesting places,cemeteries,curious places of worships,ossuaries,Europe