Cimitero delle Fontanelle

Cemetery Naples, Italy

The Fontanelle cemetery is an ancient cemetery in the city of Naples, located in via Fontanelle. Named in this way due to the presence of water sources in ancient times, the cemetery holds about 40,000 remains of people, victims of the great plague of 1656 and of cholera in 1836. The cemetery is also known because a particular rite took place there, known as the rite of the "pezzentelle souls", which provided for the adoption and arrangement in exchange for protection of a skull to which an abandoned soul corresponded.

Sometime in the late 17th century—according to Andrea De Jorio, a Neapolitan scholar from the 19th century, great floods washed the remains out and into the streets, presenting a grisly spectacle. The anonymous remains were returned to the cave, at which point the cave became the unofficial final resting place for the indigent of the city in the succeeding years—a vast paupers' cemetery. It was codified officially as such in the early 19th century under the French rule of Naples. The last great "deposit" of the indigent dead seems to have been in the wake of the cholera epidemic of 1837