The corridor through which you enter the four rooms of the cemetery has at the entrance the inscription We were like you and you will be like us. In each of the rooms, the bones of about four thousand friars who died in Rome during a period ranging from the sixteenth century to 1870 are gathered. The bones are arranged to form garlands and decorative elements, while some skeletons are dressed in friar habits and placed in niches also made of bones.
It is believed that the creation of these crypts was due to a Frenchman who fled the Reign of Terror in the eighteenth century and who, once arrived in Rome, wanted in this way to exorcise and symbolically end the Ancien Régime. Some instead see a Masonic trace, while it is possible that it is only a work of the Capuchins as a warning regarding the brevity of life and the body. It is also said that the earth found on the floor of the rooms comes from the Holy Land.
