Sunday, June 17, 2012

Fontanelle Anime Pezzentelle

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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Photo by Konstantin Mitroshen

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Photo credit: Salvadore Adelfi on Flickr

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