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 house is the chaps who’ve given up their tenancy on those six feet of earth, split up into their constituent parts and neatly sorted - heads in one pile, femurs in another. However, I couldn’t get into the bonehouse last time I was in Hythe, and someone told me it was closed. Dictators usually try to immortalize themselves. The emperor Augustus did so by building a mausoleum that is to most graves what the Empire State Building is to a two-story house. Its massive brick ramparts can still be seen, just about opposite Hadrian’s later mausoleum, which was more or less a copy of Augustus’, but is now the Castel Sant’Angelo. Originally, it was decorated with marble statues, with cypress trees growing on top; now, it’s just a brick hulk, gloomy and impressive.
In between, it has apparently been a music hall, a fortress, and a bear-baiting pit. Lenin was a different sort of ‘emperor’ and he didn’t try to immortalize himself; it was done for him. Almost everyone who goes to Moscow visits him in his mausoleum off Red Square. I haven’t - and I may not have much more time, since there are rumors that his body will be dug up and reburied elsewhere.