There are no bandages, resins, ointments, removed organs, or priests tasked with preparing the body for the afterlife, nor is there the hot, arid climate we instinctively associate with Egyptian mummies. Instead there is a small fortified village in Friuli-Venezia Giulia, the floor of a church, some ancient tombs and a combination of natural conditions so particular as to have transformed defunct municipalities into something that no one had foreseen: spontaneous mummieswith skin, limbs and anatomical features surviving decomposition for centuries.
This is the mystery of Mummies of Venzonekept today in the crypt of the cemetery chapel of San Michele, next to the Cathedral of Sant’Andrea Apostolo. Five bodies are currently on public display, but over time those found in the tombs of the church and in its immediate vicinity were almost forty, enough to transform an apparently random phenomenon into one of the most singular cases of natural mummification in Italy.
The most surprising part of the story, however, is that no one tried to preserve them.
Nature did it.
It all started in 1647 with a body that shouldn’t have been like this
In the 1647during some expansion works on the Cathedral of Venzone, a tomb dating back to the 14th century was opened. Inside, it was not the skeleton that one would have expected after almost three hundred years, but the desiccated body of a man who still retained a substantial part of the tissues.
The posture and a clear curvature of the back earned him the name with which he would become famous: the Hunchback of Venzone. She is the oldest of the country’s known mummies and her medieval tomb was located beneath what is now the Rosary Chapel.
The discovery of the Gobbo was only the beginning. In the following centuries, and in particular during the exhumations carried out in the nineteenth century, other corpses presenting the same phenomenon emerged from the tombs created under and around the Cathedral, reaching a total number of close to forty. However, they were not all medieval: while the Hunchback came from a fourteenth-century burial, the other preserved mummies are mostly attributable to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and overall the bodies associated with the Venzone phenomenon cover a chronological period that goes from 1348 to 1881.
And it is precisely this that makes the case scientifically even more interesting, because mummification does not seem to have been the unrepeatable effect of a single medieval burial, but a process that occurred several times in the same environment.
No one had embalmed them
When a body is buried, bacteria, enzymes and microorganisms quickly begin to transform its tissues, while humidity and temperature influence the rate at which decomposition occurs. Natural mummification essentially represents an exception to this process: if the water present in the tissues is eliminated quickly enough, the biological activity responsible for decomposition can be significantly slowed down and the skin ends up drying out and adhering to the skeleton. Forensic studies show that particular dry, ventilated or confined environments can produce mummification phenomena even without any human intervention.
In Venzone something similar happened under the floor of the cathedral, but with extraordinary effectiveness.
According to reconstructions handed down locally, the process could have been completed on average within the first year of burialleaving the bodies completely dehydrated and covered in thin, parchment-like skin. Once the humidity necessary for the proliferation of the microorganisms responsible for putrefaction had been eliminated quickly enough, what would normally have disappeared could thus be preserved for centuries.
But why there?
The fungus that would have “eaten” the water of the corpses
For a long time the main suspect had a name almost from a gothic novel: Hypha bombicina Pers.
This is the mold which, according to the traditional explanation still reported today by the Venzone tourist site and the Ministry of Culture, would have developed inside some tombs, contributing to removing humidity from the fabrics and therefore hindering their decomposition.
It is a fascinating explanation, to the point that over the years it has become almost inseparable from the history of mummies: an invisible fungus that comes into action in the darkness of tombs and slowly transforms a body into a sort of desiccated shell, without anyone having planned anything.
The scientific reality, however, is probably more complex.
A study published in 2016 which compared different populations of natural Italian mummies cites the case of Venzone and underlines how the process was favored by microclimate of the tombs, by the ventilation and porosity of the limestonetogether with the presence of mold indicated in historical reconstructions. In other words, there is hardly a single person responsible: it is more plausible to imagine an exceptional balance between the structure of the burials, air circulation, the ability of the surfaces to absorb humidity and microbiological activity.
It is precisely the combination that is extraordinary. Not a formula invented by man, but a small natural laboratory that remained unconsciously active under a church.
A time capsule made of skin and bones
And it is here that the Mummies of Venzone stop being just a macabre curiosity.
A skeleton can tell anthropologists a lot: biological sex, approximate age, trauma, some diseases, living conditions and even repeated activities for years can leave marks on the bones. A natural mummy, however, preserves something more, because skin and other soft tissues can survive together with the skeleton, enormously increasing the information available to reconstruct the life of a population of the past. Contemporary paleopathology in fact uses radiographs, computerized tomography and other non-invasive techniques to study these bodies without destroying them.
The dead, in other words, involuntarily becomes one biological time capsule.
And in the case of the Gobbo, that capsule leads directly to a burial from the fourteenth century, when Venzone was a fortified center located along a fundamental passageway between the Germanic world and the Friulian plain, protected by walls that still define the appearance of the village today.
We don’t know for sure who that man really was. We don’t know the thoughts he had, the people he loved or the exact day of his death, but his body possesses something that normally time would have completely erased and which instead, through a random concatenation of natural events, reached the men of the seventeenth century and then up to us.
When mummies became a European celebrity
A discovery of this kind could naturally not remain confined to Venzone.
During the 19th century some mummies were transferred to be observed and studied outside Friuli, and local sources recall specimens sent to Padua, Vienna and Paris. Their fame grew to the point that an inevitable repertoire of stories, curiosities and legends soon arose around the bodies.
He even appears among the illustrious visitors Napoleon Bonaparte. Here, however, we must distinguish the history documented by local tradition: numerous Friulian reconstructions tell that Napoleon, having learned of the unusual bodies while he was in the region, personally wanted to see them. The story is often linked to the presence of Bonaparte in Friuli in the period of the Treaty of Campo Formio 1797; However, there are no sufficiently solid elements to present as certain the date of 1807 which appears in some popular versions of the story.
The detail, even without transforming it into a certainty that the sources do not allow, still tells how much the mummies had already become a phenomenon capable of going beyond the confines of the small village.
The earthquake that risked destroying them a second time
Then, almost three centuries after the first discovery, it was the very earth that had preserved them that put what remained of the collection in danger.
The May 6, 1976the devastating earthquake in Friuli hit Venzone hard and destroyed a large part of the town. The religious complex was also seriously damaged. They were recovered from the rubble of the Rotonda di San Michele 15 of the 21 mummies which were kept there at the time and, despite the collapse, the bodies were found to be substantially intact.
It is almost a second life in their story: men and women who biologically survived decomposition for centuries managed to overcome, at least in part, even one of the most destructive earthquakes in contemporary Italian history.
Today five of those bodies are visible in the crypt of the Chapel of San Michelea 13th century construction located in the cathedral churchyard, where the permanent exhibition allows you to observe them from a few meters away.
The true mystery of the Mummies of Venzone
Perhaps it is precisely here that the story becomes most suggestive, because unlike the great mummies of antiquity there is no deliberate search for immortality.
The Egyptians developed elaborate techniques for millennia to save the body from decomposition, intervening on corpses because their preservation had a religious significance. In Venzone no one planned anything of the kind. Those men were simply buried according to the practices of their time and, under the floor of the church, temperature, air, stone and microorganisms accidentally did what elsewhere required complex knowledge, rituals and preparations. The distinction between natural and artificial mummification is in fact fundamental in contemporary anthropological studies.
And perhaps this is also why Venzone’s bodies continue to disturb more than a mummy wrapped in bandages: they were not supposed to become mummies.
They were not kings, pharaohs or characters destined to be preserved for eternity, but people who died in a small town in Friuli who should have followed the same biological destiny as millions of other men and women who lived in past centuries. Instead, a medieval tomb, an extraordinary microclimate and a concatenation of natural conditions suspended that process, leaving at least part of their bodies to pass through hundreds of years.
The real mystery of Venzone, then, is not only to understand what percentage of the phenomenon is due to mould, stone or to the ventilation of the tombs, but to observe how thin the boundary can be between what time erases and what, by pure chance, it decides to preserve.
