The church of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception

The church of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception of the Capuchins, better known as Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception, is surely one of the most striking among the hundreds of churches that adorn Rome. The main attraction of the church is definitely the crypt-ossuary decorated with the bones of 4,000 Capuchin friars, collected between 1528 and 1870 from the old cemetery of the Capuchin order. At the entrance of the crypt is written on a plaque: “What you are we were; what we are you will. »

The choice to decorate the crypt with the bones, which might look eerie and macabre, is actually a way to exorcise death and stress as the body is not a container of the soul, and as such, once it l ‘abandoned the container can be reused in other ways