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CHAPTER 2. 

CATACOMBS OF PALERMO (1872) 

Chief among the wonders of Palermo are the Catacombs of the Capuchin Convent, near the Porta d'Ossuna. It is said to be a place of great antiquity; many of the bodies have been preserved in it for centuries, and still retain much of their original freshness. Entering the ancient and ruinous court of the convent, distant about a mile from the city, I was conducted by a ghostly-looking monk through some dark passages to the subterranean apartments of the dead. It was not my first visit to a place of this kind, but I must confess the sight was rather startling. It was like a revel of the dead a horrible, grinning, ghastly exhibition of skeleton forms, sightless eyes, and shining teeth, jaws distended, and bony hands outstretched ; heads without bodies, and bodies without heads the young, the old, the brave, the once beautiful and gay, all mingled in the ghastly throng. I walked through long subterranean passages, lined with the dead on both sides; with a stealthy and measured tread I stepped, for they seemed to stare at the intrusion, and their skeleton fingers vibrated as if yearning to grasp the living in their embrace. Long rows of upright niches are cut into the walls on each side; in every niche a skeleton form stands erect as in life, habited in a robe of black; the face, hands, and feet naked, withered, and of an ashy hue; the grizzled beards still hanging in tufts from the jaws, and in the recent cases the hair still clinging to the skull, but matted and dry. To each corpse is attached a label upon which is written the name and the date of decease, and a cross or the image of the Savior.

Soon recovering from the shock of the first impression, I was struck with the wonderful variety and marked expression of character in the faces and forms around me. There were progressive dates of death, extending from remote centuries up to the present period, the niches being so arranged as to admit of a regular order of deposit. Many of the bodies stood erect, as if just lifted from the death-bed; the faces colorless, and the horrible agonies of dissolution stamped upon the features; the lower jaws hanging upon the breast; the teeth grinning and glistening between the parched lips, and "the black hue of sickness about the mouth and around the sunken sockets of the eyes; and in some the sightless orbs were open and staring with a wild glare of affright, as if peering into the awful mysteries of the future; while others wore a grotesque laugh of derision still more appalling, with the muscles of the mouth drawn up, the eyebrows lifted, the head tilted knowingly on one side, the hair matted in horny tufts, the bare spots on the skulls, like the piebald wig of a harlequin ; the skeleton arms outstretched, and the bony fingers spread as if to clutch the relentless destroyer, and wrestle with him to the last. These I fancied were lively fellows, who were carried off suddenly after a midnight carouse. I sat down on a box containing a dead child, and looked up at a row of bodies opposite that attracted my notice in a particular degree. In the middle stood a rollicking fellow, about two years dead, whose sunken eyes appeared still to burn with the fire of life and humor. His hands were lifted in a deprecating manner over a congregation of corpses sitting on a shelf below. Some appeared to be listening; some grinning at his humorous harangue; others, with their heads together, seemed to question the propriety of his anecdotes ; old gentlemen, with knitted brows and lantern jaws; ranges of bodies stood on each side of him as if laughing, talking, praying, dying, suffering, listening, rejoicing, and feasting at the banquet of death. One little man, in a dingy suit of black, sat in a corner; the end of his nose was eaten off by the worms; his mouth was compressed, and had a pinched expression; his hands grasped eagerly at something. I thought that little man was a miser, whose death was caused by starvation. Another figure, a large portly body, stood in a conspicuous part of the vault; it was the corpse of a fat old bishop, whose jaws were still rotund and smooth with good living, and his sleek hair was patted down to his head as with the oil of bygone roast beefs and macaroni soups, and his jolly cast of countenance betokened a system liberally supplied with the juices of life, and a conscience rendered easy by attention to the creature comforts. That man lived an easy life, and died of good feeding. He was carefully labeled, and carried on his wrists a jeweled cross. There stood in another part of the vault a fiery orator, with open mouth and distended arms.

The head was thrown back, the breast partially bare, a few tufts of black hair fell from his piebald skull; his round staring eyes were stretched wide open, and his brows arched high on his wrinkled forehead; he looked toward heaven for inspiration. I fancied I could hear the flaming torrent, as it blazed and crackled and scintillated from his thin ashy lips. It was the glowing eloquence of an ardent soul that left its parting impress upon the clay; the form yet spoke, but the sound was not there. Passing on from vault to vault, I saw here and there a dead baby thrown upon a shelf its innocent little face sleeping calmly among the mouldering skulls; a leg, or an arm, or an old skull, from which the lower jaw had fallen; now a lively corpse, jumping with a startling throe from its niche, or a grim skeleton in its dark corner chuckling at the ravages of the destroyer. Who was the prince here? Who was the great man, or the proud man, or the rich man? The musty, grinning, ghastly skeleton in the corner seemed to chuckle at the thought, and say to himself, "Was it you, there on the right, you ugly, noseless, sightless, disgusting thing? Was it you that rode in your fine carriage, about a year ago, and thought yourself so great when you ordered your coachman to drive over the beggar? Don't you see he is as handsome as you are now, and as great a man; you can't cut him down now, my fine fellow! And you, there on the left. What a nice figure you are, with your fleshless shanks and your worm-eaten lips! It was you that betrayed youth and beauty and innocence, and brought yourself here at last to keep company with such wretches as I am. Why, there is not a living thing now, save the maggots, that wouldn't turn away in disgust from you. And you, sir, on the opposite side, how proud you were when I last saw you; an officer of state, a great man in power, who could crush all below you, and make the happy wife a widowed mourner, and bring her little babes to starvation; it was you that had innocent men seized and cast into prison. What can you do now? The meanest wretch that mocks you in this vault of death is as good as you, as strong, as great, as tall, as broad, as pretty a piece of mortality, and a great deal nearer to heaven. Oh, you are a nice set of fellows, all mixing together without ceremony! Where are your rules of etiquette now; your fashionable ranks, and. your plebeian ranks; your thousands of admiring friends, your throngs of jeweled visitors? Why, the lowliest of us has as many visitors here, and as many honest tears shed as you. Ha! ha! This is a jolly place, after all; we are all a jolly set of republicans, and old DEATH is our President!"

Turning away from this strange exhibition of death's doings, I followed the old monk into the vaults allotted to the women. Here the spectacle was still more shocking and impressive. The bodies were not placed in an upright position like those of the men, but were laid out at full length in glass cases; the walls on both sides were covered.

The young, the gay, the beautiful, were all here, laid lowly in the relentless embrace of death; decked out in silken dresses, laces, and jewelry, as in mockery of the past. Each corpse had its sad history. I saw a young bride who was stricken down in a few brief months after her marriage. She was dressed in her bridal costume; the bonnet and veil still on, the white gloves drawn over her skeleton fingers; a few withered flowers laid upon her breast by the mourning one she had left behind. Through the thin veil could be seen a blanched, grinning, bony face; the sunken sockets of the eyes marked around with the dark lines of decay; the long hair drawn in luxuriant masses over her withered bosom. Another held in her arms a skeleton babe. Some were habited in walking dresses; others in all the finery of ball-room costume, with gay silks, slippers, silk stockings, and tawdry lace. It was a ghastly sight to look under the bonnets, and gaze upon the sunken ashy features, decked around with artificial flowers; to trace in those withered lineaments no lingering line of beauty, no flickering ray of the immortal spirit, but a dreary history of mortal agony, decay, and corruption. Yet here the husband comes to hold communion with the beloved soul that once dwelt in that mouldering corpse; to look upon those blanched features that were once animate with life and affection; to kiss the cold lips, and feel no returning warmth. And here, too, the father, brother, sister, and wife come to gaze upon the dead; and here the mother comes to weep over the withered corpse of her babe. Once a year, as I learnt from the old monk, the relatives of the deceased come to pray for the salvation of their souls, and deck the bodies with flowers.

Many a night had that old monk spent down in these dark vaults, among the dead; not as a penance for evil-doing, though he confessed that he was weak and sinful, but to pray for the soul of some brother, who had been his companion in years past. It was not gloomy to him, he said; it made him hopeful if not happy; for he felt, when surrounded by these mortal remains, that he was nearer to God. There were friends here, whom he had loved in youth and manhood; whose hands he had grasped in fellowship, whose eyes had beamed kindly upon him when his heart was sad: now grim and motionless in the dark recesses around him. He liked to gaze upon them, and think of a re-union with the immortal spirits that had left them tenantless.

Surely that old man was sincere. What more was the world to him than to the dead with whom he mingled. What pleasures could life have to one whose capacity for earthly happiness had long since been destroyed by continued self-denial, by the tearing out from his heart of every unbidden hope, by fasting and penance, and by all the sacrifices of light and sunshine that could turn inward the tide of thought? What save the contemplation of the future? Yet it seemed as if in his midnight watches he must sometimes feel undefined terrors check the flow of his blood; that the rustling of the night air among the folds of the shrouds, and the dropping asunder of skeleton forms; the sudden grating of the doors, when moaning gusts of wind swung them open upon their hinges; the dry rattling of fleshless jaws, the gnawing of bones by the vermin, the sepulchral gloom, must sometimes startle him from his reveries like a coming solution of the dread mystery. Who can tell not even himself of all the strange thoughts that flit through his brain in the dreary watches of the night; what weird visions he sees of life brought back again into those ghastly corpses; what faint moans rise from out the darkness moans for lives misspent, and never more to return upon earth; wild bursts of anguish for errors that can never be retrieved, prayers for one drop of mercy before the day of eternal doom! In these dread, dark hours, I thought how the cold sweat must gather upon his brow, and the strength forsake him, and the clammy grasp of the unseen hand the skeleton hand that never relents for youth or beauty, for fame or virtue draw tight around his throat, and make his breath come thick and short, and his eyes stare affrighted, like the sightless orbs of the dead along the walls.

From the conversation of the monk, I learnt that these catacombs are supported by contributions from the relatives of the deceased, who pay annually a certain sum for the preservation of the bodies. Each newcomer is placed in a temporary niche, and afterward removed to a permanent place, where he is permitted to remain as long as the contributions continue; but when the customary fees are not forthcoming the corpses are thrown aside on a shelf, where they lie till the relatives think proper to have them set up again. Whole shelves are filled with skulls and bodies of the dead, put out of the way to make room for others of a more profitable Character.

It might be supposed that the air of the catacombs is in some degree affected by the fresh bodies; but this is not the case. There is no offensive odor, and the visitor would scarcely know, if he did not see them, that he was surrounded by the dead. I could perceive no difference in the atmosphere of these vaults from that of any other subterranean places, except a slight smell of mould, not altogether disagreeable. The fresh air is admitted from the top, and it is to its extreme dryness that the preservation of the bodies may be attributed.