Capuchin Cemetery

The last few days have been a little weird without class. It's been nice to have a break from studying, but at the same time, the reason I'm here is to get better at Latin. We've had study sessions where some of the more advanced students take the reins and we translate at sight, but they're not nearly as edifying an experience; it's pretty much something I could do on my own sitting at home or in library in Ann Arbor. The new news is that Reggie's surgery is scheduled for tomorrow and he'll be back in class on Thursday.

The other day I went to Santa Maria della Concezione. It's a church in the central-northern region of the city run by Capuchin friars. The church is on the Via Veneto, which is kind of a swanky street. There's a lot of upscale restaurants and nice hotels and smack dab in the middle of it is this church. The church itself isn't that impressive, realtive to the rest of the city's churches. It does have a lot of decoration, a nice altar, and a bunch of statues and paintings, but I do prefer the more epic churches like St. John Lateran and Gesu. The draw to the church is its cemetery. Over 4,000 people are in the cemetary. The bones of the dead are organized into different designs and artwork, much of the time separated into types of bones. The monks nailed bone patterns into the ceilings and walls so that almost every surface is covered; in some cases things hang down that resemble chandeliers. I almost bumped into one; I guess I'm a bit larger than the average friar that the area was created for. The full skeletons of monks are so creepy. They're still wearing the robes that they wore when they were alive and are all really small, posed inside skeletal arches, standing up with their hands in praying positions. The furthest room had a skeleton child made to look like a grim reaper with a scale and a scythe. He had a small marker under him that said, "Remember that one day we were as you are now, and one day you will be as we have become." Not really my cup of tea, but something one has to see while in Rome.