The Misery Machine - Rosalia Lombardo: The World's Most Beautiful Mummy | The Capuchin Catacombs

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

Join Drewby and Yergy as we discuss the Capuchin Catacombs, a 16th century ossuary in southern Italy meant to house the remains of priests and friars, which has become something of a morbid tourist attraction, and the home to the world's most beautiful mummy, Rosalia Lombardo. A very special thank you to Levi for supporting our show as our highest tier patron! Join Our Facebook Group to Request a Topic: https://t.co/DeSZIIMgXs?amp=1 Support Our Patreon For More Unreleased Content: https://www.patreon.com/themiserymachine PayPal: https://www.paypal.me/themiserymachine Instagram: miserymachinepodcast Twitter: misery_podcast Discord: https://discord.gg/kCCzjZM #themiserymachine #podcast #truecrime Source Material: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosalia_Lombardo https://mummipedia.fandom.com/wiki/Rosalia_Lombardo http://www.palermocatacombs.com/explore/rosalia-lombardo https://www.amusingplanet.com/2017/01/rosalia-lombardo-mummy-that-blinks.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catacombe_dei_Cappuccini https://youtu.be/EOhSd0ugmI4 https://youtu.be/7JwRnps04EM https://youtu.be/yDpNv3DhQJ8

Hi, we're the Miser Machine. I'm Yergy. And I'm Drewby. And this week we're doing something a little different from true crime. It's still pretty fascinating, nonetheless. It's the Capuchin Catecomes from Palermo, Sicily. It's one of my favorite things that I learned about growing up, so I hope you really like it as much as I do.

Yes, absolutely. And if you're listening on YouTube, please hit like and subscribe. We just passed 3,500 subscribers. Thank you so much for everyone to the support. If you're new here, hitting subscribe, hitting the bell notification, we'll ensure you don't miss any of our future episodes. So without further delay, the Capuchin catacombs and the world's most beautiful mummy. The Capuchin catacombs of Palermo and Sicily are a somewhat macab tourist attraction,

as well as the home to about 8,000 corpses and 1,252 mummies that line the walls. It is a place that I, Yergi, have wanted to visit since I was about 10 years old. When I was in fourth grade, I purchased a book on mummies from our monthly school-ast. book order and became immediately fascinated with the bodies preserved in Celtic bogs, the child sacrifices tucked away deep in the Andes Mountains, ice mummies, and of course, the Capuchin catacombs and their most famous resident. I kind of wish that's what I was getting my scholastic book order. I was always getting goosebumps books and being disappointed. There was really, really good books that came around the time that I was in fourth grade.

So obviously, you know I was getting my goosebumps books. I had all of them. They were underwhelming. They weren't great. But I liked them. They had great covers. Yeah, it was mostly the covers and just so you could touch the title. I was just so unimpressed because it was like, where is the gore? Where are people getting torn apart? It was nothing like that. And just everybody in my class was like, yeah, these are like the cool books, but they really weren't.

In my book order, I got my very first true crime book. It was a book on Lizzie Borden. And I bought it. Well, my mom bought it for me. Before true crime was cool. Before true crime was cool, Yergy, 10 years old, has a Lizzie Borden book. That's who I went as for Halloween that year. So how did the catacombs come to be?

Simple, logistics. Palermo's Capuchin Monastery outgrew its original cemetery in the 16th century due to impart to the number of plagues that ravaged Europe for centuries. And monks began to excavate crips below it. In 1599, they mummified one of their own, the recently deceased brother Sylvestero of Gubio and placed him lovingly into the catacombs. I'm sure I'm mispronouncing some of these, but give me a break here. So the bodies were dehydrated on the racks of ceramic pipes in the catacombs and sometimes later washed with vinegar or other cleaning solutions.

Some of the bodies were embalmed and others were enclosed in sealed glass cabinets, put on display for families and visitors to see. Friars were preserved with their everyday clothing and sometimes with the ropes they had worn for penance. Originally the catacombs were attended to be only for the dead friars. However, in the following centuries, it became a status symbol to be entombed in the capuchin catacombs. In their wills, local nobles and influencers of the time would ask to be preserved in certain clothes or even to have their clothes changed at regular intervals. Priests wore their clerical vestments. Others were clothed according to contemporary fashion. Relatives would visit to pray for the deceased and also to maintain their body.

So there was one I read about these two dead children. The parents paid to have them set up hold. holding hands and two chairs next to each other. So that way when the family would visit, they would be able to all hold hands in a circle and pray, I guess. And pray, yes, because you have to remember, you know, this is in Italy. Everyone's very Catholic, so this is very important.

So the catacombs were maintained through donations of the relatives of the deceased. Each new body was placed in a temporary niche and the later place in a more permanent place. As long as the benefactions continued, the body remained in its proper place. But when the relatives did not send any more money, the body was put aside on a shelf until they resumed their payments. So this is a very common occurrence around the world where resting places are not final. So this is due to overcrowding and in some cases mass violence.

And where families have to pay leases on graves. In some countries, if a family falls behind on payments, the deceased are evicted and placed in a mass grave. Now, this is a lot of the world. Yeah, if you think this is nuts, this has happened in America. when I visited New Orleans, a lot of those graves were mass graves. They are, especially those oven graves or oven vaults, whatever they call them. Yeah. The ones with like the shelves and you see them in the stone where they basically get put in.

Over time, they essentially bake in there. Yeah, you basically liquefy and fall through. Yeah, and you like fall through and a new body goes in. One thing I can't seem to get over is earlier. You said the influencers of the time would ask to be preserved in certain clothes and put in the catacombs. They're just picturing a bunch of Instagram influencers on display at these crypts. I don't know. We don't know how things were back that.

I'm sure there were some fancy people who are much like the influencers of today. Oh, I'm sure socialites and all of that. So the halls were divided into categories. So you have your men, you have your women, you have your virgins. I don't know how we're figuring that out. Children. I don't know why they're not with the virgins. Priests, monks, and professionals.

So some bodies are better preserved. than others, and in fact, many appear to be just clothed skeletons. Many are skeletons. Some have maybe a shard of like dried flesh on them, but a lot of them you're going to see in there are just skeletons. Some are set in poses. For example, as Drewby mentioned, there are two children sitting together in a rocking chair. The last friar who was interred into the catacombs was brother Ricardo in 1871, but other famous people were still interred. The catacombs were officially closed in 1880, but tourists continued to visit. The last burials, are from the 1920s, and one of the last to be interred was Rosalia Lombardo. Lombardo's bodies kept in a small chapel at the end of the catacombs tour

and is encased in a glass-covered coffin, placed upon a wooden pedestal. Rosalia Lombardo was an Italian child who died of pneumonia, resulting from the Spanish flu one week shy of her second birthday, so it's interesting that what kind of is going on right now happened 100 years ago almost exactly. Rosalie's father, Mario Lombardo, a known local businessman, asked Alfredo Salafia, an embalmer and local taxidermist, to preserve her remains. Thanks to Salafia's embalming techniques, her mummified body, sometimes called Sleeping Beauty, was amazingly preserved and with the aspect of a sleeping angel. X-rays of her bodies show that all of her organs are remarkably intact.

Rosalia looks like she was plunged into an endless sleep, with long eyelashes profiling her clothes. eyes, a yellow ribbon in her blonde flowing hair, and a plump face with red rosy cheeks. Rosalia is so perfectly preserved that she is considered the world's most beautiful mummy. Recent photographs within the last decade of Rosalia Lombardo shows that her mummy is beginning to display signs of decomposition, most notably discoloration of her skin, with a light, white fuzz appearing all about her face. Her hair also appears to have lightened, but this could be an allusion due in part to the darkening and modeling of her skin. To address these issues that Mother Nature has presented, her mummy was moved to a drier spot

in the catacombs, and her original coffin was placed in hermetically sealed glass enclosure with nitrogen gas to prevent decay. Even with these aforementioned changes, little Rosalia's body remains one of the best preserved in the catacombs. It absolutely is. So when you look at earlier pictures of her, she literally looks like a person who is asleep. And from the book that I received on Mommies in fourth grade and pictures I saw of her around that time, she had literally not changed since the 20s. She had perfect eyelashes.

She looked like a little sleeping girl. But over the past 30-ish years, things have definitely changed. If you look at the pictures, which will include in the YouTube, her skin is darkened quite a bit. And it really feels like her hair looks bleached. Now, I don't know if that's just something natural that happens as you die. it might very well be, because looking at pictures of her earlier on, her hair looks more brown, and now it's bleach blondes. So it could be just natural changes, but she definitely does look different now.

In 2009, the Capuchin Catacombs curator, Dario Piambino Mascali, discovered a handwritten manuscript written by Alfredo Salafia, wherein he lists the ingredients he used to mummify Rosalia. Pianbino Mascali tracked down the living relatives. of Salafia and found in their possession documents where he had recorded his secret procedure. The embalming formula is described as one part glycerin, one part formal and saturated with zinc sulfate and zinc chloride, and one part of an alcohol solution saturated with salicylic acid, which entered into Rosalia through a single point injection, most likely into the femoral artery via a gravity injector. Unlike typical embalming and mummification of the past, where the internal

organs were removed and the empty cavities were filled with natron salts to completely desicate the body. The formuline was used to kill bacteria. The glycerin was used to prevent desiccation and the salicylic acid used to eliminate any fungi within the flesh with the purpose of the zinc salts to begin petrification. Rosalia Lombardo has achieved further notoriety for a phenomenon which her eyes appear to open and close several times a day, revealing her intact blue irises, and we'll put up a clip of that happening right now. In response to speculation about her moving eyelids, curator Dario Pianbino Miscali stated that it's an optical illusion produced by the light

that flitters through the side windows, which during the day is subject to change. Her eyes are not completely closed, and indeed they never have been. So he made this discovery when he noticed that the workers at the museum had moved her coffin, causing her body to shift slightly, which allowed him to see her eyelids better than they, ever had before. And I do believe, I mean, definitely quote me if I'm wrong here. I feel like

that's the reason she started to decay is they were moving around a little bit. That would definitely aid it from my understanding. That's what I think probably happens. Now, this is something that it's one of those wonders of the world that isn't going to be around forever. You can only preserve a human body for so long. It's amazing they were able to preserve a human body to this extent in the early 1900s. So I'm sure within the next 50 years, there's going to be some more serious decay. There's already been some serious decay in the past 20 or 30. You'd mentioned to me off air that you remembered seeing this when you were younger and now seeing this when you're older. There's been a giant change. I mean, there has. Well, go ahead and we'll put some pictures in the YouTube, but it's a very different.

Like I said earlier, when I was a little girl, she just looked like a sleeping little girl. And now you can tell that she's a dead person. You definitely can see it. Her eye. eyes have sunk a little bit. Her hair, like I said, has lightens. It looks like there's mold on her. I'm pretty sure it's not mold. I'm sure it's just the hairs on her skin showing a little bit more because her skin is so dark now. But she definitely looks like a dead person now and she didn't before. So this is something that I absolutely want to go check out one day. I mean, it's something I've wanted to do since I was little. And it's just an interesting cultural place. I think this is the only mummy in the world that's one, this preserved and two

this visited. Well, I really wouldn't say she's the most visited or preserved. She's definitely the most preserved or was for the time that she was in perfect condition. You have to think about Lenin. He's very well preserved too

and is very visited. I forgot about Lenin. I forgot they have his remains on display still, don't they? They do. I did not. I keep forgetting that. I just keep thinking about Egyptian mummies and how a lot of them aren't very well preserved or you don't really see their remains on display for most of them anyways.

They're just in the sarcophagus and sarcophagi. And that's all you get to see for my understanding. And honestly, I'd say she is probably more well preserved than Lennon. They take Lennon out of his coffin all the time and wash him. Do they? They do. So I imagine he's got some decay going on. Man.

And his face looks like it's been wax cast a little bit. So I wouldn't say that he's probably as well-preserved. as she is. Is he lying in state permanently, or do they have a specific memorial site for Lenin? There's a specific memorial site, I believe, in the Red Square. Okay. I haven't looked into it in a little while, so I could be wrong. I mean, I completely forgot that they even had his remains out like that, which is kind of crazy to think about.

They do the same thing with Stalin? I don't think so. I think it's just him that they have some sort of, I guess, effigy of. Yeah, for sure. But it's kind of like the same thing. I want to do another episode in the future about the saints they have on display. Like the Eastern Orthodox saints. So to be a saint, you have to be, they say incorruptible or uncorruptible.

I forget the exact word of it. It's basically that you don't rot or decay. Decay is probably the nicer word than rot. But what kind of goes on with saints is they keep them on display. And a lot of them are decomposing. They just put like wax casts over their hands and faces. that you don't know. But there are a lot of saints on display in Europe in the surrounding areas. If there is any bumps, I apologize, because Callie was rubbing against me and the mic. But, okay,

so you meet in Europe. I thought you were specifically meeting in Russia, their saints. No, I mean, I'm sure there's some on display in Russia, but there are saints on display. The remains of actual saints? Of actual saints on display. Wow, I didn't even know that. Yeah, we'll have to look into it because it is an episode that I'd love to do one day. I'm actually floored. I didn't know that. I didn't know there was remains of any surviving saints except for those within the past hundred years or so. No, there's tons of different ones that are really, really, really old. I didn't know that.

Yeah, it's pretty interesting. I mean, it's still weird. Like, I say this all the time when I went to Paris and I went to, like, the major graveyard there, the one where Jim Morrison's buried, even though I couldn't find his grave. You see graves from the 1100s and it's just, it's much different than seeing graves here in the States. It just evokes this different feeling. Well, speaking of Paris, another episode that I want to do one day is of the bone osuary that's underneath the city. And I'm like so sad that you didn't get to go see that when you were in Paris.

Well, I'm going to have to go back. I didn't know there was a bone ossuary or else I would have demanded we go to it when I was there. Yeah, you'd go down some stairs and I guess it's really cold underneath there, which is kind of cool. But it's all bones and skulls and it's where people went back then. It's so crazy. It's so crazy. I guess last thing since the episode's over, you want to talk about that Lizzie Borden book in here, Halloween. So, yeah, I'll definitely go ahead and get it.

get into that. So kind of how I got into this. When I was in fourth grade, we had our monthly scholastic book orders. I don't know if your schools had something like that, but we got the flyer in our mailboxes and we could order books. So one of the first true crime books that I ever purchased was a book on Lizzie Borden that just happened to be in the elementary school book order. So I dressed it for Halloween as Lizzie Borden. I had this kind of prairie dress, even though obviously she wasn't wearing any sort of prairie dress, but it was like a period dress. My mom put my hair up in a bun. I had some bloody acts that I made, and we sprayed red hair spray all over me to make it look

like blood spatter. So this is what I did as a fourth grader. So you're like nine or ten years old? Nine or ten years old. And the mummy book, which inspired all of this, this was the greatest book ever. And again, it was in my scholastic book order, fourth grade. I ordered this. And it had information on the Capuchin catacombs and Rosalia Lombardo.

It had information on the bog mummies. So there's some mummies they recovered in the UK that generally were people that were hung. And they just tossed them into the bogs after they were done. But when they retrieved the bodies, they were so perfectly preserved. They were still flexible. You could see fingerprints on them perfectly. Yeah. Their clothes were preserved.

The clothes were preserved. It really looked like these folks were just sleeping. Their bodies were completely turned black, though, from the bog. I wish that we had prepared notes for. for that too because that is something interesting to talk about. That is always fascinated for a very long time. This one bog was able to preserve full human remains for hundreds of years. Well, that's something we can definitely talk about in a different episode. I mean, it's not going to be much to talk about. It's like five or ten minutes, I'm sure. Just I wanted to be able to explain the scientific properties that allow that to happen because, right, I've looked it up before, but I don't rightly know it off the top of my head to speak about it. We can definitely do a full mummy episode because there's many. different ways you can be preserved. You have your traditional Egyptian ways. There's a lot of folks that die at high altitudes, that the conditions are just so perfect that become mummified, like the child sacrifices in the Andes Mountains. I'm not familiar with that. I just know about

the sky burials. So in the Andes mountains, they would take a lot of children and sacrifice the gods. These are Incas. And they would put them in little caves and nooks up in the in the Andes. And they would just leave them there to die. And a lot of those children, they look, like they're sleeping. They're just kind of huddled up and they have their full features and everything. And a lot of burials in Mexico because of the dryness of the sand and the temperatures and the low humidity, mummify in their graves. It's just the different types of conditions around the earth can cause natural mummification without having to go the full on process with the resins and the salts and the embalming that they did in Egypt with the traditional mummies that you would know. Is there any correlation between your love of mortuary science and your knowledge of mummification and embalmings? Yes. Actually, this is where it started. So fourth grade, I wanted to be an Egyptologist. I wanted to go and discover mummies and artifacts. And then from there, it kind of evolved into wanting to get into more forensic science. And then it turned into mortuary science. This is exactly the path from me being a nine or ten year old girl to where it turned into today. That makes a lot of sense.

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