Capuchin Crypt

Capuchin Crypt tickets: which one to buy

A single modest ticket covers the museum of the Capuchin order and the crypt beneath it, and the route runs one way through both; you cannot see the bones without walking the museum first, which takes about twenty minutes and is better than it sounds, with a Caravaggio attributed to his circle among the paintings. An audio guide is included in some ticket versions and is worth having, since the labelling in the crypt is deliberately sparse.

Queues are rarely long and booking ahead is needed only at Easter and in high summer. Guided walking tours of underground or macabre Rome usually include the entry fee and combine the crypt with the Pantheon, the Trevi area or the church of Santa Maria della Concezione above; they cost several times the ticket and suit visitors who want the context of seventeenth-century Rome rather than just the spectacle. There is also a rare evening product combining the visit with a choral concert in the church upstairs.

Visiting Capuchin Crypt: what to see

When the Capuchins moved here in 1631 they brought 300 cartloads of their dead from the old friary, along with soil from Jerusalem, on the orders of Urban VIII. As friars died over the next two and a half centuries, the longest-buried were exhumed and their bones added to the decoration, so that the remains of about 3,700 people now line six small chapels.

Each room has a theme: pelvises, skulls, leg bones, and in the Crypt of the Three Skeletons a child's skeleton holds a scythe and a scale, both assembled from vertebrae. Whole robed skeletons stand in niches in Capuchin habits. The order is firm that this is not a curiosity but a memento mori, and a plaque at the end states the point plainly: what you are, we once were; what we are, you will become. The rooms are small, dim and quiet; the whole crypt takes fifteen minutes to walk and stays with you much longer.

Capuchin Crypt opening hours and the best time to go

Open daily from mid-morning to early evening, with last entry half an hour before closing, and shut on a few religious holidays. It is a short walk from Piazza Barberini and the Metro line A, which makes it easy to slot into a day. The space is small and coach groups fill it quickly in the middle of the day, so early or late is better; the crypt is never crowded in the way the Vatican is, but twenty people in a room of four square metres feels like many.

Photography is strictly forbidden throughout the crypt and staff watch for it. Silence is expected and the rooms are not suitable for young children, who often find them frightening. Dress code is the Roman standard, shoulders and knees covered. The church upstairs, Santa Maria della Concezione, is free and worth five minutes for the painting of St Michael that Guido Reni left here.