Humanizing Death - The Fontanelle Cemetery: analyzing tourists’ motivations, experiences and evaluations

Thanatourism refers to the practice of visiting places connected with death, sufferance and grief. Although the label, together with dark tourism, has been strongly questioned because of its implications, it is still recognized as valid not only by academic scholarship but also by its audience. Its popularity is recently connected with the massive presence of death-related contents within mass media and mainstream cultural industry, but it is an ancient phenomenon, which can be traced back to thanatopsis, i.e. the medieval contemplation of death. Consequently, thanatourism is the practice of travelling in order to experience, directly or indirectly, the presence of death. While the explanations of the phenomenon are still at the stage of hypothesis, this field of tourism has recently seen a great increase. Started as niche tourism, it is now sharply increased to significant numbers. Even Naples, an Italian city building its tourist attractiveness on the Mediterranean joie de vivre, is experiencing an increasing number of visits to places such as catacombs, crypts and ossuaries. The Fontanelle Cemetery is one of these Neapolitan sites, a huge ossuary located in Sanità, an urban district unfortunately infamous for a high level of social exclusion and unemployment. The thousands of human remains stored in this cave, turned into an ossuary in the 19th century, became soon objects of faith. The cult of souls of Purgatory, which used to take place until 1969, featured here a specific practice: the adoption of unknown skulls. Nowadays the site is managed as part of Neapolitan cultural heritage and it attracts an increasing number of tourists year after year: what are the motives, experiences and post-visit evaluations of people visiting this site? The research aims to answer these questions through the content analysis of 27 in-depth interviews conducted with tourists of the Fontanelle Cemetery. Both autonomous tourists and tourists who joined a guided tour have been taken into analysis. Additionally, interviews with two guides from two different tours were conducted in order to grasp understanding of how the respondents may be influenced by different approaches. The content analysis suggest that the visits at the Fontanelle Cemetery are perfectly framed into the hypothesis, suggested by Seaton (2009), of dark tourism as a way to face death within a safe tourist experience. The particular atmosphere, different from any catacomb or normal cemetery, together with traditional legends connected to specific skulls, made easier for the respondents to deal with the great amount of human remains. Furthermore, as for noticed for Body Worlds (Lantermann, 2009), tourists were more likely to be reflective and meditative about the issues of human mortality and vulnerability after the visit. To conclude, the research includes suggestions for further inquiries about the role of storytelling practices in facing the fear of death and the agency of contemporary Western people within the paradigm of medicalization.