In December 1920 a little girl called Rosalia Lombardo died in Palermo of pneumonia. She had been born on December 13, 1918, so she died a week short of her second birthday. Her parents were Mario Lombardo, an army officer, and Maria Di Cara. The illness is usually given as bronchopneumonia, believed to have been a complication of influenza in the last years of the great flu pandemic. Even that is hedged in the sources: “believed” and “likely” are the most they will say.
Her father could not bear the thought of her body simply going into the ground. The story goes that he wanted to go on seeing her face. What is certain is that he went to a Palermo embalmer named Alfredo Salafia and asked him to preserve her.
The Horror
Salafia (1869–1933) was a known name in the city’s embalming trade. Popular retellings add that he had already preserved cardinals and aristocrats; that is not confirmed in any source, so take it as tradition.
What the record does support is the method. His handwritten manuscript lists the ingredients as glycerin, formalin saturated with zinc sulphate and zinc chloride, and an alcohol solution saturated with salicylic acid. The roles usually given are these: formalin to kill bacteria, zinc salts to harden the tissues, alcohol to dry them, glycerin to stop her drying out altogether, and salicylic acid to keep fungus away. The fluid went in by a single injection through a small puncture, most likely into the femoral artery by a gravity injector, and “most likely” is the sources’ own phrase.
It worked, and it has gone on working. X-rays show that her internal organs are remarkably intact. Under the glass her skin is pale, her hair is golden and tied back with a silk bow, and she looks like a child asleep.
The Blinking Eyes
Visitors have long reported that her eyelids seem to open a little and close again over the course of a day, showing a sliver of blue iris. The curator of the catacombs, the anthropologist Dario Piombino-Mascali, says this is an optical illusion. Her eyes, he says, were never fully closed. The light coming in through the side windows changes through the day and throws shifting shadows across her face. One popular source says he worked this out in 2009, after workers moved the coffin and gave him a better view of the lids. The Wikipedia article gives no date, so the year rests on that one weak source.
The explanation is plain enough. The effect on a person standing in front of her is not.
The Lost Formula
After Salafia died in 1933, the exact recipe was thought lost. The sources agree that it was rediscovered in his own handwriting, but not on when or by whom. His Wikipedia page says his technique was found in a handwritten memoir in 2007 and does not name the finder. A popular site credits Piombino-Mascali with tracking down Salafia’s relatives and their documents in 2009, and a 2009 paper by Piombino-Mascali and colleagues is titled “The Salafia method rediscovered”. So the popular claim that Piombino-Mascali found it in the early 2000s is unsettled. The one firm point is that Salafia wrote the method down and a manuscript survived.
The Last Burial?
It is often said that Rosalia was the last body ever placed in the Capuchin Catacombs, and that the catacombs had officially closed to burials in 1881. Both claims are shaky. The Wikipedia article gives 1880 as the official closure and says the last burials fell in the 1920s and 1930s. It names the final one as Giovanni Licata di Baucina, Count of Isnello, in 1939. Other sources say only that Rosalia was among the last people admitted, and that is the claim the sources support. A child who died in 1920 was received after the formal closure, which suggests an exception was made, though no source says so outright.
The Modern Relic
The catacombs lie under the Capuchin convent at Piazza Cappuccini on the edge of Palermo. The first body placed there, in 1599, was a friar, Brother Silvestro of Gubbio, and the monks went on to add their own dead. In time well-off townspeople paid to be laid there too. The catacombs now hold about 8,000 bodies, 1,252 of them mummies according to a 2011 census. They are grouped by category: men, women, virgins, children, priests, monks and professionals. Many are dressed in the clothes they wore in life.
At the end of this, Rosalia lies in a glass-topped coffin in a side room. After a 2009 photograph showed discoloration and a yellow, waxy look to her skin, she was moved to a drier spot and her original coffin was placed in a sealed glass case filled with nitrogen. The sources give no date for that work. Popular accounts say the case also protects her from light, humidity and visitors’ breath, but no source states those aims directly.
The catacombs are open to the public. Admission is a few euros, anywhere between about 3 and 5 depending on the listing, and hours differ from one listing to the next. The listings consulted were not the official site, so check before you go.
Her father wanted her to be seen. More than a hundred years later, she is.
