This December 13^th  it will be exactly one hundred years ago that Rosalia Lombardo died of the terrible Spanish flu pandemic that followed the end of the First World War. She was just a few days short of her second birthday yet, at her final resting place in the crypt of Palermo’s Capuchin cemetery, I saw a child as uncorrupted and as lovely as the day she died, thanks to master embalmer Alfredo Salafia who used a mixture of one part glycerine, one part formalin, saturated with zinc sulphate and zinc chloride, and one part of an alcohol solution saturated with salicylic acid.

Little Rosalia has been thus preserved for all those who descend into the cemetery’s crypt to admire her. She is surrounded by almost two thousand other mummified beings who can never hope to aspire to her charms having had less artful embalmers work upon them.  Some have their skins eaten by insects revealing their naked skull beneath. Others have their formerly fine funeral garments rotting in ghostly tatters on their dessicated flesh.  Those dead who received no remuneration for their upkeep from the family’s descendants have been stacked on shelves, removed from their original positions. Even in the afterlife one can still suffer bankruptcy…

Some people may say what a horrible sight it is to step through the cold damp corridors of an underground catacomb and gaze upon petrifying and putrefying corpses. Yet a previous age did not see things quite like this. Originally it was only capuchin monks who were privileged to be mummified in this way and placed in the weird crypt.  However, among the Palermitani it became a status symbol to be embalmed and remain in the company of the religious fraternity and so, at the end of the sixteenth century, the practice began. It was only in 1881, after sanitary warnings, that it began to die out and it was little Rosalia Lombardo who was the last embalmed in this fashion. Looking at her sweet self I could hardly envisage Rosalia to be now buried in the damp soil and to see her rosy cheeks eaten by worms and her body to be turned into dust.

The ’memento mori’ awakened by the Capuchin cemetery is indeed pulsatingly vivid. All too often we fail to remember that, as Prospero says in Shakespeare’s ‘The Tempest’, “we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep”. Let us be reminded, however, that the only truly dead are those who have been forgotten. Even those upon whose sunken sockets one may still gaze today in Palermo’s cemetery are now mostly unremembered…

Stepping from the crepuscular gloom into the bright Palermo morning I visited the more conventional part of the cemetery with its marble tombs packed closely together. Among these I found the memorial of someone who will never be forgotten as long as humanity survives; one who encapsulates the Sicilian ethos better than most:  the enigmatic Conte di Lampedusa. Giuseppe Tomasi, the author of ‘Il Gattopardo’ – the Leopard (or more accurately, the Ocelot). With him lies his beloved wife Alexandra Wolff Stomersee of German Baltic descent, psychoanalyst by profession, whom he married in Riga and who survived the Count by twenty five years.

As Lampedusa said:

“Finché c’è morte c’è speranza”.

(As long as there’s death, there’s hope.)