Visitors to the island of Ischia, just 22 nautical miles off from Naples, Italy, usually don’t miss the Aragonese Castle, a towering military fort sculpted out of volcanic rock on a tiny inlet connected to Ischia with a 220-meter-long bridge. But not many travelers know that inside the medieval gates of “Castello Aragonese” lies a unique structure that is a testament to how Catholics understood death in the Middle Ages.
Known in English as The Putridarium of the Poor Clares (after the Latin noun putredo, meaning “decay”), this centuries-old room hidden within the Aragonese Castle was used by the Poor Clares, nuns of the order founded by St. Clare.
Poor Clares were in fact living within the premises of the Aragonese Castle from 1577 to 1809 inside a monastery that is now no longer active.
Putridaria, temporary funeral chambers where bodies were kept before being moved to their final resting place, were a relatively common feature of Catholic churches during the Middle Ages. Their function was, basically, to help accelerate bodily decay. Some of the techniques used by nuns in this process are similar to those used by ancient Egyptians for the mummification process. Bodies were left in these humid rooms for months until all that was left was skin and bones -- a process that, according to some strands of Catholic medieval thinking, represented a metaphorical “purification” and final separation from temporal, “earthly” life.
Once corpses were “purified” they could be transferred to their final resting place, usually within ossuaries hosted inside the church premises. As explained by Elisabeth Harper in the blog “Order of the Good Death,” these rooms were part of the tradition of “double burial,” where the moment of death was not seen the “end of the road” but just one stop on the journey towards afterlife.
Indeed, as Harper notes, for Catholics death is not the end, but the beginning of a new life, with physical death being just a stop on the way, the door to pass through.
But putridariums were not just used as “purification rooms.” They also played a vital role for monastic prayer. During the Middle Ages, monks or nuns would gather inside these chambers to contemplate death and ponder the last things. In the case of the Putridarium of the Aragonese Castle, one of the few examples of putridaria that remains open to visitors in Italy, nuns would gather inside the room to pray for the souls of the deceased and contemplate the impermanence of life.
Today, centuries after these places were in use, a visit to this unusual site in Ischia can prove to be inspiring for everyone. As Harper notes, contemplating physical death can remind us of the impermanence of life and inspire us to use our finite time on earth in a better way. To visit the Putridarium of the Nuns of Saint Claire in Ischia you can purchase tickets for the Aragonese Castle here.
