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 [...]

The best cadaver tombs in Europe, though, are in England. One in Ewelme church, Oxfordshire, is truly gruesome; and there are nastily realistic ones in Wells Cathedral, and also in Tewkesbury Abbey. But my favourite is old As-I-Am, in the south aisle of Norwich cathedral: a portrait bust of a skeleton incised and infilled in [...]

Dead Europe

I remember seeing the Archbishop when I was a child. I was about nine, he was nearly five hundred years old. His name was Simon of Sudbury, and his skull – tautly covered with yellow shriveled skin – was kept in a box in the vestry in a church in Sudbury, [...]

Cults of Personality

Along with great treasure-houses like the Louvre and Prada, and the many fine regional, historical, and special interest museums, Europe abounds in sites devoted to particular individuals.
Both the individuals and the museums range from the famous to the forgotten, from the magnificent to the merely curious. In a few cities, [...]

Housed in four splendid 18th- and 19th-century buildings, part of which comprised the Russian royalty’s Winter Palace (and still retains the name & much of the interior splendor thereof). The collections, housed in over three hundred rooms, are in total one of the largest in the world. They are divided into 6 major exhibits: Prehistoric [...]

One may justly describe all of Rome as a great museum, with every side street leading to another exhibit (and some streets exhibits in themselves). Of what is indoors or under glass, however, the treasures accumulated by the See of Rome are the most varied and spectacular. Located in nearly 5 miles of rooms and [...]

If the British Museum sits at one end of the table, the
mighty Louvre gazes back from the other. French acquisitions spanning more than 1,000 years—including the stockpiles of such acquisitive types as Louis XIV and Napoleon—fill three sprawling, multi-story wings with some 300,000 objets d’art. Any one of the Louvre’s sixteen topical sections (Renaissance Sculptures, [...]