Cimitero delle Fontanelle — the skulls of the forgotten souls

OVERVIEW

The Fontanelle cemetery is a charnel house in a cave in the tuff hillside of the Materdei and Sanità quarters of Naples. When the 16th-century city began moving burials out of its churches, undertakers carried older remains to the cave; in 1656 thousands of anonymous victims of the great plague joined them, and after floods washed bones into the streets in the late 17th century the cave became the unofficial, then official, paupers' cemetery — the last great deposit after the cholera of 1837.

HISTORY

In 1872 Father Gaetano Barbati had the chaotically buried bones dug up and catalogued, and they were stacked in makeshift crypts, boxes and racks. A spontaneous devotion grew up around them: the rite of the 'anime pezzentelle', in which a family adopted a skull (a 'capuzzella') and its abandoned soul in exchange for protection, cleaned it, brought it candles and flowers, and waited for the dead to appear in a dream, say its name and ask for 'refrisco' — relief for the souls in purgatory. The small church of Maria Santissima del Carmine was built at the entrance. Concerned at the fetishism, the parish priest asked Cardinal Corrado Ursi for guidance, and on 29 July 1969 a church decree banned the individual cult of the skulls, allowing one Mass a month and a procession each 2 November.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

Several skulls have their own legends. The 'Captain', the best known, is said in one version to have appeared at a wedding as a man in uniform, invited in mockery by a jealous groom who had poked a stick into the skull's eye — and to have stripped to a skeleton, at which the couple and guests dropped dead; the two skeletons in a coffin beneath Barbati's statue are popularly held to be that couple. Donna Concetta, 'the head that sweats', stays polished and damp while the others gather dust; devotees say the moisture is the sweat of souls in purgatory, and that if your hand comes away wet, your wish will be granted. A cavity called the 'Tribunal', with three crosses on a base of skulls, is said to have been where the old Camorra swore its blood oaths. A record of a living folk cult, filed as such.

VISITING

The entrance is beside the church of Maria Santissima del Carmine in Via Fontanelle. The Italian article records the 2010 reopening, a further closure in 2019, and management by a social cooperative with a ticket; check opening before going.