France · 1789Catacombs of ParisA whole population, unnamed, arranged as decoration. Who decided that, and when?The Catacombs of Paris are underground ossuaries in Paris, France, which hold the remains of more than six million people. The ossuary was created as part of the effort to eliminate the effects of the city's overflowing cemeteries. In addition to directing the stacking of skulls, femurs and tibias into the patterns seen in the catacombs today he used the cemetery decorations he could find (formerly stored on the Tombe-Issoire property; many had disappeared after the 1789 Revolution) to complement the walls of bones.
Photo: Dominik Matus · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
Catacombs & Underground · Italy
Fontanelle cemetery
The open question
Bones of thousands, or millions, moved and stacked. Where did all these people come from, and why are the names gone?
On the record
The Fontanelle cemetery in Naples is a charnel house, an ossuary, located in a cave in the tuff hillside in the Materdei section of the city. To make space in the churches for the newly interred, undertakers started removing earlier remains outside the city to the cave, the future Fontanelle cemetery. Then, in 1872, Father Gaetano Barbati had the chaotically buried skeletal remains disinterred and catalogued.
- Year
- 1872
- Kind
- ossuary
Sources
More from Catacombs & Underground
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