Cemetery of the Capuchins, Roma

I visited the Cemetery of the Capuchins during my honeymoon to Italy in 2001. The crypt is located in the basement of a small church along a crowded Rome street. It's really the last place you expect to find elbaorate ornate works of art created from human bones. They do not allow photography, but you can purchase a book of postcards which appears below. It's a humbling, macabre experience of mortality when imagining that each of the many skulls belonged to a head not unlike one's own.

Via Veneti, 27, Roma Italy

Cimitero dei Cappuccini
Cemetery of the Capuchins
Cimetiere des Capucins
Friedhof der Kapuziner

From the postcard book:

The crypt is located just under Santa Maria della Concezione, a church commissioned by Pope Urban XIII in 1626. The pope's brother, Cardinal Antonio Barberini, who was of the Capuchin order, in 1631 ordered the remains of thousands of Capuchin monks exhumed and transferred from the friary Via dei Lucchesi to the crypt. The crypt now contains the remains of 4,000 monks buried between 1500-1870, during which time the Papal States permitted burial in and under churches. The underground crypt is divided into five chapels lit only by dim natural light seeping in through cracks, and small fluorescent lamps which cast strange shadows.
"What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you will be."

capuchin_1_capella 1st Cappella