8 March 2010 – The Good Funeral Guide

Looking like death

Most people don’t reckon to look their best when they’re dead, but this was not how the status conscious citizens of Palermo in Italy saw it.

Starting in 1599 the Capuchin friars were mummified or embalmed, then displayed, standing, in the catacombs beneath their friary. The idea appealed to the wealthy citizens of Palermo, who clamoured to join them. Permission was granted and, over the centuries, their numbers grew and grew. The custom was only discontinued in the 1920s.

There to this day they stand or sit or lie, gathered according to profession, wearing the clothes they wore in life. They now constitute a fascinating record of social history – and an object of appalled fascination to goggling tourists.

Around 8,000 desiccated corpses gregariously survive in varying states of repair, their expressions altered over time, many of them now seeming silently to be singing in chorus, nattering, making merry or expostulating. One of the last to be entombed was a child, Rosalia Lombardo, who remains to this day touchingly well preserved.

There’s an excellent article by AA Gill here.

Be sure to see the photos which go with the piece here.

There’s more about Rosalia here.

There’s a melodramatic clip about Dario Piombino-Mascali, a palaeopathologist who is working hard to preserve Sicilies many mummies, here.

There’s a website full of pictures plus some very good links here.

Lastly, here is a YouTube film, described by a commenter most appropriately as “sweetly macabre.”

Blackened greens?

Is it just me or do you, too, feel that it seems like a long time ago since there was a consensus on climate change? I signed up to it because I met lots of people I liked and admired who had already subscribed and who read lots of books about it and quoted terrifying scenarios and insisted, “You must see this amazing thing on YouTube.”

I also signed up to it because I don’t understand science but I do trust scientists – in much he same spirit as Hugo Rifkind: “when I can’t be arsed properly to understand something, I tend to defer to those who can. I trust engineers to build bridges and I trust doctors to cure diseases. Likewise climatologists on man-made global warming. Most of them seem to believe in it. They might all be wrong, but they’re less likely to be wrong than I am. Call me a mindless stooge, but that’s good enough for me.”

Now, I guess, there are lots of us who are not so sure. There was the Climategate scandal: all those hacked emails which revealed, in the words of James Delingpole, “Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organised resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more.” With this scandal came allegations that climate science is driven by a political agenda, post-normal science, which encourages its followers to suppose that it is quite all right to lie if the cause is noble. Again, Delingpole is the one who writes most attractively about this.

No wonder Peter Preston thinks we need an eco-prophet to galvanise us.

If people are going wobbly on climate change, I wonder how they’re feeling about this in the natural burial movement?