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FILE 124 · VOL XX · The Dead Are Still Working
The World's Most Beautiful Mummy Is a Two-Year-Old Girl. Tourists Swear She Opens Her Eyes.
Her father asked for her to look asleep forever. Forever is a long time to keep your eyes shut.
Based on: Rosalia Lombardo
Intake record
| Recovered from | Restoration workshop, Palermo, Sicily, inside a crate returned from a museum loan |
|---|---|
| Contents | An embalmer's notebook page in Italian, a 1920s hospital card, a night custodian's statement, a sequence of 12 photographs taken one minute apart |
| Finder | Giulia Ferrante, conservation assistant |
| Status | Rosalia Lombardo is real and on display. The twelfth photograph is not explained. |
Recovered file
Under a church in Palermo, Sicily, there is a set of long underground corridors called the Capuchin Catacombs. They hold the preserved bodies of about eight thousand people. [1]
Starting around 1600, the Capuchin monks began preserving their dead brothers there. Later, wealthy families in Palermo paid to have their own dead preserved too. The bodies were dried and dressed in their best clothes. They hang on the walls, stand in niches and lie in open coffins. Priests. Doctors. Lawyers. Children. All arranged by category, in rows, staring at visitors. [1]
It is one of the strangest places in Europe. Tourists come by the thousands.
At the end of one corridor, in a small chapel, there is a glass-covered coffin. Inside is a little girl with blond curls and a yellow silk bow in her hair, lying with her head on a pillow.
She looks asleep. She looks as if she might wake up if you knocked on the glass.
Her name is Rosalia Lombardo. She died in December 1920, a week before her second birthday, of pneumonia. [2]
She has been dead for more than a hundred years.
Her father was heartbroken. He asked a famous embalmer in Palermo, Alfredo Salafia, to preserve her so perfectly that she would never change. [2]
Salafia did. Rosalia was one of the last people ever placed in the catacombs. [1] For decades, nobody knew how he had done it. Salafia never published his method. [2]
In 2009, a researcher named Dario Piombino-Mascali tracked down Salafia's handwritten notes, which had been kept by the embalmer's relatives. They revealed the formula: formalin, zinc salts, alcohol, salicylic acid and glycerin. [2] The zinc had kept her body firm, and the glycerin had kept her face full. [2]
He had made her look exactly like a child asleep.
The rest of this file is sealed. The ending, the sources and the archivist's note unseal with the file.
Unseal File 124 ($2.99) · its volume · everything ($49.99)
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