Rome: Guided Catacombs Tour & Capuchin Crypt (Audio Guide)
Get ready to have your assumptions about Rome turned upside down on this incredibly unique journey of discovery. The itinerary includes some of the most uncommon, mysterious and outlandish sites the Eternal City has to offer. Start your experience at Touristation office in Piazza d'Ara Coeli 16 and take the Panoramic Bus to reach the Catacombs. Embark on a fascinating underground tour of the Catacombs, taking you into the unusual history of Rome. Learn about how dating almost 2,000 years to the 2nd century AD, this extensive network of underground tunnels was once a burial ground and a place of worship for the first Christians in Rome. After the guided tour at the Catacombs, the dedicated transfer will bring you to the famous Capuchin Crypt in Via Veneto. Visit on your own with the audioguide. The Crypt is inside a museum attached to the Baroque church of Santa Maria della Concezione, close to Piazza Barberini. Explore the museum collects and exhibits about some significant aspects of the Capuchin friars in general. Learn about the simple lifestyle, closeness to the poor and spirit of fraternity that characterize the religious order, whose history is recounted from its origins in the 16th century to the present day. The Crypt is a singular work of art with a macabre all-Baroque taste, lending it the macabre nickname of "the Bone Chapel". Walk in the long corridor with five chapels, decorated on the vaults and walls with the mortal remains of nearly 4,000 friars dating from between the 16th and the 19th centuries, composed in such a way as to form rosettes, pilasters, stars, hourglasses, clocks and butterflies, chandeliers and crosses. Admire on the walls piled thousands of shinbones, femurs and skulls turned into building materials to create niches and architectural structures that house skeletons dressed in the habit of some of the friars. Each chapel bears the name of the bones with which the decorations were made and contains, according to tradition, holy earth transported here from Palestine or Jerusalem.