A chilling Sunday morning
Jan. 27th, 2013 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
london1967I haven't 'blogged' about out Saturday in Naples yet: sight-seeing is such an exhausting and time-consuming business! Plus quite a chunk of time is taken by planning what to do the next day (using public transport has its drawbacks).
I am skipping Saturday for the time being and moving on to the first place we visited this morning (and leaving the rest for another time).
We went to the cemetery of Le Fontanelle in the Rione Sanità. The neighbourhood - apparently - is the 'real' working class Naples, and rather rough, I have to say.
And don't expect a pretty cemetery - the entrance is a metal sliding door: it could have been the entrance to someone's backyard.
The cemetery is a set in a former cave of tufa; the cave was abandoned in the 17th century and used for the victims of the bubonic plague first and then for many more epidemics up to the one of cholera in the mid 19th century.
The bones are stacked up and piled up against the walls but what makes this cemetery quite unique is a local superstition/cult that started in the second half of the 19th century.
People used to 'adopt' a skull and look after it, praying for the release of its owner from purgatory, hoping to get something back when the soul reached heaven.
This custom (started by a priest) went on for a long time until the archbishop of Naples forbade it in the 1960s. But it is certainly not extinct, judging from what is left there as offerings.
I have put the pictures behind a cut because well it's really not everyone's cup of tea. I have to confess that we were both quite glad when we left the place. I had cheese at dinner and I do hope that I'm not going to have nightmares! lol!
The mummified remains of a countess (one of only a few corpses with a name) - said to have choked on a gnocco.
Bones everywhere...
An ex-voto.
I am skipping Saturday for the time being and moving on to the first place we visited this morning (and leaving the rest for another time).
We went to the cemetery of Le Fontanelle in the Rione Sanità. The neighbourhood - apparently - is the 'real' working class Naples, and rather rough, I have to say.
And don't expect a pretty cemetery - the entrance is a metal sliding door: it could have been the entrance to someone's backyard.
The cemetery is a set in a former cave of tufa; the cave was abandoned in the 17th century and used for the victims of the bubonic plague first and then for many more epidemics up to the one of cholera in the mid 19th century.
The bones are stacked up and piled up against the walls but what makes this cemetery quite unique is a local superstition/cult that started in the second half of the 19th century.
People used to 'adopt' a skull and look after it, praying for the release of its owner from purgatory, hoping to get something back when the soul reached heaven.
This custom (started by a priest) went on for a long time until the archbishop of Naples forbade it in the 1960s. But it is certainly not extinct, judging from what is left there as offerings.
I have put the pictures behind a cut because well it's really not everyone's cup of tea. I have to confess that we were both quite glad when we left the place. I had cheese at dinner and I do hope that I'm not going to have nightmares! lol!
The mummified remains of a countess (one of only a few corpses with a name) - said to have choked on a gnocco.
Bones everywhere...
An ex-voto.
