7. Cimitero delle Fontanelle - Naples
The Fontanelle cemetery is an ossuary, situated in a cave in the tuff hillside in the Materdei region of Naples. This Cemetery is correlated with an episode in the folklore of the city. When the Spanish migrated into the city at the start of 16th century, there was already anxiety over where to locate cemeteries, and moves had been taken to locate graves out of the city walls. A lot of Neapolitans, nevertheless, insisted on placing interred in their nearby churches. To create space in the churches for the newly interred, undertakers initiated taking out previous remains outside the city to the cave, the future Fontanelle cemetery. The remains were interred shallowly and then after that joined in 1656 by a huge number of unknown corpses, victims of the great plague of that year.
Someday in the late 17th century, huge floods washed the remains out and into the streets, showing a creepy and grisly spectacle. The unknown remains were brought back to the cave, at which point the cave started to be the unofficial last resting place for the indigent of the city in the succeeding year.The last huge addition of the indigent deaths seems to have been in the wake of the cholera epidemic of 1837.
After that, in 1872, the chaotically buried skeletal remains disinterred and catalogued. They remained on the surface, kept in makeshift crypts, in boxes and on wooden racks. An impulsive cult of devotion to the remains of these unnamed dead then appeared in Naples. Defenders of the cult stated that they were paying respect to those who had had nothing in life, who were being too poor even to have an appropriate burial. Devotees paid visits to the skulls, cleaned them, "adopted" them, in such a way, furthermore providing the skulls back their "living" names (revealed to their caretakers in dreams). An entire cult sprang up, devoted to taking care of the skulls, speaking with them, requesting favors, sending them flowers, and many more.
The cult of devotion to the skulls of the Fontanelle cemetery lasted into the mid-20th century. In 1969, Cardinal Ursi of Naples made the decision that these kinds of devotion had degenerated into fetishism and then instructed the cemetery to be closed.
Nowadays It has undergone restoration as a historical place and can be visited.
Folklore associated with Fontanelle talk about stories regarding their original "owners" and precisely how they interacted with the living. The "Captain's skull" is just one such tale: a poor teenage girl adopted a skull and knew from her dream that the skull had been a Spanish captain. She talked with him, prayed to him, and also wanted to know that she might find a husband. Few months later she actually did. On the wedding day in church, everyone seen a stranger in anachronistic military garb in church. He smiled at the teenage bride, at which stage the envious bridegroom hit him in the face. Return to the cave, in which she had wanted to show appreciation for "the captain", she noticed that the skull got a completely new mark, a bruise around the eye.
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