The story
Set into the floor before the high altar of this church on Via Veneto, a tombstone reads in Latin, here lies dust, ashes, and nothing. It marks the grave of Cardinal Antonio Barberini, a Capuchin friar and brother of Pope Urban VIII, who oversaw the building of Santa Maria della Concezione. The pope blessed its first stone in 1626, and the church was finished in 1631.
The same cardinal had the remains of thousands of Capuchin friars brought here from the order's older friary. Under the church their bones were later arranged as ornament through a row of small chapels, with arches, rosettes and lamps built from skulls, vertebrae and pelvises, and a plaque telling the visitor, what you are now, we once were, what we are now, you shall be. Today you reach the crypt through a museum of the Capuchin order, opened in 2012.
Up in the church, the first chapel on the right holds Guido Reni's Archangel Michael trampling the devil, painted in 1635. A Roman story, never proven, says Reni gave Satan the face of Cardinal Giovanni Battista Pamphilj, the future Pope Innocent X.
The museum's own treasure is a Saint Francis kneeling in meditation over a skull. It was credited to Caravaggio in 1908, and in 1968 an almost identical canvas turned up in a church at Carpineto Romano, in the hills south-east of Rome. After both were restored around 2000, many scholars came to favour the Carpineto picture, now shown at Palazzo Barberini, as the original, while the friars present theirs as Caravaggio's own.
