Part Two: Alchemy of Flesh and Salt

 

The dead do not simply lie here. They are preserved — suspended between decay and eternity by rituals that feel more like alchemy than medicine. In the Capuchin Catacombs, preservation was not a sterile process. It was intimate. It was sacred. It was haunting.

You walk past rows of bodies, their skin drawn tight like parchment, their eyes hollow but watching. These were not embalmed in the way we think of today. They were dehydrated slowly, laid upon ceramic racks in the Embalmer’s Room, where the air was dry and the silence absolute. After weeks, they were washed in vinegar, a final cleansing — not just of flesh, but of memory. Some were treated with arsenic, lime, or zinc salts, each ingredient a whispered promise to hold back rot.

The most famous of these rituals was reserved for Rosalia Lombardo, the child whose body remains so intact that she seems merely asleep. Her embalmer, Alfredo Salafia, used a secret formula: formalin to kill bacteria, glycerin to prevent desiccation, salicylic acid to stop fungi, and zinc salts to preserve form. Her cheeks still blush. Her eyelashes still cast shadows. She is the catacombs’ most delicate ghost.

But even before Rosalia, the monks understood that preservation was more than technique. It was devotion. To preserve a body was to preserve a soul’s presence. To embalm was to remember. Each body was dressed, posed, and placed with care — not hidden away, but displayed, as if still part of Palermo’s living society.

In this chamber, science and ritual blur. The Embalmer’s Room becomes a laboratory of memory, where the dead are not lost but transformed. Flesh becomes relic. Salt becomes spell. And the catacombs whisper: We are still here.