Italy, by using X-ray technology to analyze the remains of some of the 163 children buried there.
The first comprehensive study of mummified children in Sicily’s famous burial catacombs in the city of Palermo is being led by Staffordshire University.
Home to more than 1,280 skeletal and mummified bodies, the Capuchin Catacombs are open to the public as a somewhat macabre tourist attraction.
Bodies dating from the late 16th to early 20th centuries are still dressed in the period refinery and in the halls and crypts of the underground cemetery.
The catacombs include the embalmed body of Rosalía Lombardo, a young Sicilian woman who died of pneumonia caused by the Spanish flu in 1920.
THE CATACOMBS OF THE CAPUCHINS
The Capuchin catacombs contain more than 1,280 skeletal and mummified bodies.
Palermo’s Capuchin monastery outgrown its original burial ground in the 16th century, and monks began digging crypts below.
In 1599 one of them, recently ᴅᴇᴀᴅ brother Silvestro de Gubbio, was mummified and placed in the catacombs.
The cemetery was first reserved for church workers, then the deceased from all walks of life were accepted, and experienced its greatest popularity during the 19th century.
An inscription hung around the neck or pinned to the chest indicates the name, dates of birth and death of the deceased.
The cemetery was officially closed by civil order in 1880, but the last burials date from the 1920s.
The cemetery has now become a kind of museum full of forgotten ᴅᴇᴀᴅ, which are guarded by a group of Capuchin monks.
The Arts and Humanities Research Council has provided more than £70,000 of funding for the two-year project, which starts later this month.
“Work starts next week, which is very exciting,” Dr Squires told MailOnline.
‘The data collection will take a week and then we will carry out archival research in the following week while we are in Palermo. All collected images will be analyzed in the coming months.’
There are at least 163 bodies of children housed in the catacombs, including 41 children located in a designated children’s room, the so-called ‘children’s chapel’.
However, very little is known about these individuals, and death records from the time contain limited information, such as only the name of the deceased and the date of death.
Dr. Squires and her team will examine the 41 children housed in the Children’s Chapel who died between 1787 and 1880 using a portable digital direct X-ray machine.
“We are testing 41 juveniles as we cannot access the remaining individuals as they are located in the catacombs and are inaccessible,” Dr Squires told MailOnline. “We are targeting individuals in the children’s crypt.”
The X-ray machine will capture digital images of each child from head to toe. It is a non-invasive alternative to destructive techniques such as autopsy.
In total, 574 x-rays will be taken to generate a biological profile of the mummified children to establish if mummification was reserved for specific children based on factors such as their age and Sєx.
X-rays will also detect the presence of developmental defects, indicators of stress, and pathological lesions, the aim of which is to gain insight into the health and lifestyle of children when they are alive.
“Determining whether the children buried in the catacombs had environmental stress on their bodies can tell us about the living conditions and environments in which they lived,” said Dr. Squires.
SKELETON OR MUMMY?
The Capuchin catacombs contain more than 1,280 skeletal and mummified bodies.
The skeletonized remains have decayed down to the bone.
Mummies, for their part, are bodies in which soft tissues still survive.
One example of a mummy is the extraordinarily preserved body of Rosalía Lombardo, a young Sicilian woman who died of pneumonia caused by the Spanish flu in 1920.
These finds will be matched against each child’s location in the room, their burial attire and associated artifacts (such as chairs and canes), the type of mummification (natural or artificial), and any surviving historical documentation.
Until now, most of the research work on the remains of the Capuchin Catacombs has focused on the skeletons of adults, and less on children.
“The Capuchin catacombs comprise one of the most important collections of mummies in the world,” said Dr. Squires.
“However, there is very little documentary evidence about the children who were granted mummification and the death records of the time contain limited information. Our study will rectify this knowledge gap.
“Since this funeral rite was primarily reserved for adults, we want to understand why children were mummified.
“We have a pretty good idea that they belonged to the upper strata of society, but we don’t know much more about the health, development or identity of young people during this period.”
One exception is the incredibly preserved embalmed body of Rosalía Lombardo, which has been the subject of media coverage in the 21st century.
The mummy has achieved notoriety for a phenomenon in which its eyes appear to open and close several times a day, revealing its blue irises intact.
The curator of the Capuchin Catacombs, Dario Piombino-Mascali, has said that this phenomenon is due to an optical illusion produced by light filtering through the glass windows covering his coffin, which is subject to change during the day.
“[His eyes] are not completely closed, and in fact never have been,” Piombino-Mascali said in 2014.
Dr. Piombino-Mascali, who is working with Dr. Squires on the latest project, researched the preservation of Rosalía Lombardo about a decade ago.
He said that several of the mummies of children in the Capuchin Catacombs “look like sleeping children.”
