However, my favourite macabre sight there is not the Lenin mausoleum, but the Novodevichy cemetery, tucked away behind the old monastery. Besides Chekhov, Kruschev and some other greats, you can find a scientist with the sign of the atom on his tomb; a group of airmen in the shade of a giant Zeppelin model; urns [...]

You also used to be able to visit the bonehouse in the church of St Laurence at Hythe, in Kent, when I was a child. There’s no lurid story to accompany this display - quite simply, a large town with a small churchyard has to reuse the graves, and what you see in the charnel [...]

For the ultimate in mortal kitsch, another catacomb demands to be visited, that of the Capuchin church in Rome, in Via Veneto. Here, some few monks (a few hundred years in paradise already) stand guardian in their habits; but a perverted sense of ingenuity led to the recreation of rococo stucco decoration in human bones. [...]

The catacombs of Palermo are quite another matter. Here, in the dry soil which desiccates the dead flesh, are long corridors flanked by the upright bodies of the Palermitans, from the seventeenth century right through to the Risorgimento.   Some of the corridors are well lit; the mummies seem to have just stepped off the [...]