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Rosalia
Lombardo was only two years old when she died from pneumonia in 1920.
Her premature death left her father so heartbroken that he approached
the noted embalmer, Alfredo Salafia, and asked him to preserve Rosalia’s
body. Alfredo Salafia, a skillful embalmer and taxidermist, performed
such an excellent operation on Rosalia that nearly a hundred years after
her death, the little girl appears to be merely dozing beneath the glass
case in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Italy, where she rests.
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Her little cheeks are stiff puffy. Tuffs of blonde hair are gathered
around a knot above her head and tied by a silk bow. Even her internal
organs are intact, as revealed by X-ray scans. Nicknamed the “sleeping
beauty”, Rosalia Lombardo has gained the reputation of being one of the
world’s best preserved mummies.
Rosalia’s perfectly preserved body is only part of the attraction.
Visitors who come to see her swear that the little girl actually blinks
here eyes. These sequence of pictures show her eyelids eerily opening
and closing by a fraction of an inch. Her blue eyes are intact, like the
rest of the body, and can be seen glistening in the low lights inside
the catacombs.
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It’s thought that changes in temperature inside the crypt causes her
eyelids to contract producing the blinking effect. But Capuchin
Catacombs’s curator, Dario Piombino-Mascali, has a different theory.
Piombino-Mascali believes that Rosalia’s blinking eyes is an optical
illusion caused by the angle at which the light from the windows strike
her.
As the day progresses and the direction of the light changes, Rosalia
appears to open and close her eyes several times throughout the day.
Piombino-Mascali made this discovery in 2009 when he noticed that the
workers at the museum had moved her coffin causing her body to shift
slightly, which allowed him to see her eyelids better than ever before.
Piombino-Mascali realized that Rosalia’s eyes are not completely closed
and never were.
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But his real discovery was the secret formula Alfredo Salafia had used
to keep Rosalia’s body in impeccable condition. In 2009,
Piombino-Mascali tracked down the living relatives of Alfredo Salafia
and found in their possession documents belonging to Salafia, where he
had recorded his secret procedure.
Unlike typical embalming, where the internal organs are removed and the
empty cavities filled with natron salts to completely desiccate the
body, Salafia made a small puncture in the body and injected a mixture
of formalin, zinc salts, alcohol, salicylic acid, and glycerin. Each
ingredient in the concoction performed a unique job.
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The formalin killed all the bacteria, the glycerin ensured that her body
didn’t desiccate, and the salicylic acid wiped out any fungi in the
flesh. The magic ingredient was the zinc salts that petrified Rosalia’s
body giving it rigidity and prevented her cheeks and nasal cavities from
caving in.
The “sleeping beauty” is one of eight thousand mummies in the Capuchin
Catacombs of Sicily. It was one of the last corpses to be admitted to
the catacombs.
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