La veglia eterna

The reader is guided to descend the stairway that leads to the catacombs and, beyond the iron gate, here come the mummies. They are standing upright in white niches, wearing their withered clothes. They resemble a macabre version of the earliest black and white photos, where men with huge moustaches and women with bulky underskirts stand in stiff poses looking like stuffed dummies. The most beautiful one is little Rosalia, snug in her tiny coffin: her expression is serene, her skin smooth and soft, and her long blond locks are gathered by a yellow bow and endow her with an extraordinary feeling of liveliness. Whereas Rosalia Lombardo was embalmed, as were various other bodies present in the Catacombs, most of the corpses underwent a process of natural mummification – which does not involve the elimination of entrails and brain or the injection of special preserving liquids. An extremely ancient tradition across Europe, mummification was especially popular in Sicily, and the Palermo Catacombs still remain the most extraordinary expression of this tradition, on account of the sheer number of corpses preserved there (1,252 bodies and 60 wooden coffins, some of them empty, according to