The Fontanelle cemetery in Naples is a charnel house, an ossuary, located in a cave in the tuff hillside in the Materdei section of the city. Some
estimates say the Fontanelle Cemetery
once held some 8 million human bones. The skeletal remains of those too
poor to afford a proper burial place and the untold number of souls
claimed by disease. In use since the 1500s, it was a depository for
every major epidemic starting with the plague of 1685 up through the
cholera outbreak of 1836.
After Father Gaetano Barbati started cleaning and cataloguing the skeletal remains in 1872, a cult known as the anime pezzentelle,
abandoned souls developed. Devotees cleaned, cared for and prayed for
the abandoned souls doomed to an eternity in purgatory for nearly 100
years.
Closed by the Archbishop of Naples in 1969 over growing concern the cult
had become fetishism, the Fontanelle Cemetery suffered a long period of
degradation. After a major renovation project that started in 2002, the
cemetery was reopened to the public in 2006, but only for a few days
each year. Finally, after a protest in 2010, Fontanelle Cemetery was
returned to the public on a full time basis.
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