The Mummies of Venzone and the Village That Lived With Its Dead
- Daniel Holland
- 4 hours ago
- 7 min read
When the coffins beneath a small church in northern Italy were opened after three centuries, the bodies inside should have collapsed into dust. Instead, the faces were still there. Hands, skin, even expressions remained. The people of Venzone did not see a scientific puzzle at first. They saw their ancestors waiting patiently underground.
What followed is one of Europe’s most quietly unsettling stories of death, belief, science, and community. The mummies of Venzone are not embalmed, wrapped, or deliberately preserved. They are the accidental result of environment, chemistry, and time, and they raise questions that have still not been conclusively answered.
A plague town in the shadow of the Alps
Venzone sits in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region of north eastern Italy, close to the Carnic Alps and long positioned on a key medieval trade route between the Adriatic coast and central Europe. In the fourteenth century it was a fortified town of modest importance, surrounded by stone walls and dominated by its cathedral and chapels.
Like much of Europe, Venzone was devastated by the Black Death. Beginning in 1348, waves of plague swept through the region, killing large numbers of the population in a matter of months. Death came faster than burial. Churchyards filled, graves were reused, and eventually there was simply no room left.
Local custom dictated burial within consecrated ground, and so a pragmatic decision was made. Bodies that could not be buried were placed in coffins and stored in the basement of the chapel of San Michele, adjacent to the cathedral. It was never intended as a long term solution. The dead were meant to rest there temporarily until space could be found.
Time intervened. Wars came and went. Generations passed. The coffins remained sealed beneath the chapel floor.
The opening of the coffins in 1647
In 1647, plans were made to rebuild and extend the chapel of San Michele. The basement had to be cleared. Workers began removing the old coffins, many of which had not been touched for roughly three hundred years.
When they opened them, they expected skeletons.
Instead, they found bodies that were dried, shrunken, and astonishingly intact. Skin clung to bone. Facial features were recognisable. Clothing, where present, was desiccated but preserved. One body in particular, known later as the “Hunchback of Venzone”, drew immediate attention because of its distinctive spinal curvature.
At least 42 mummified remains were identified at the time. None showed signs of deliberate preservation. There were no embalming substances, no wrappings, no rituals consistent with artificial mummification. Whatever had happened to these bodies had happened naturally.
The people of Venzone did not yet have a word for what they were seeing. The term “mummy” was not in local use. The explanation they reached was spiritual rather than scientific.
Ancestors who stayed behind
The townspeople came to believe that God had allowed their forefathers to remain intact to protect the village. These were not corpses to be feared. They were elders who had stayed close.
The mummified bodies were treated with respect and familiarity. They were spoken to, greeted, and sometimes asked for help or good fortune. Accounts from later centuries describe villagers tipping their hats to the mummies or pausing to acknowledge them in passing.
“They thought God had sent their forefathers to guard the village while still living,” later wrote observers attempting to explain the tradition. “The townspeople had to value the mummies as their forefathers.”
This relationship persisted for centuries. Until the mid twentieth century, the mummies were not sealed away as museum objects. They were part of daily life, stored in accessible spaces, dressed, repositioned, and occasionally displayed during religious or civic moments.
The idea that the dead could remain present without horror is difficult to reconcile with modern sensibilities, but in Venzone it felt natural. Death had been ever present during the plague years. The preserved bodies were not monsters. They were reminders.
Early scientific curiosity and Napoleon’s interest
By the eighteenth century, the mummies of Venzone had begun to attract attention beyond the town walls. Scholars and collectors across Europe were increasingly fascinated by unusual natural phenomena, particularly those that challenged existing medical knowledge.
Some of the bodies were transported for study. Individual mummies were examined at the University of Padua, the Vienna Museum, and even at Saint Louis Cathedral in Paris. Each time, observers remarked on their extraordinary lightness and preservation.
One body weighed as little as 15 kilograms. Others ranged between 10 and 20 kilograms. This was not simply dehydration. Internal organs were often partially preserved. The skin showed little sign of putrefaction.
In 1807, Napoleon Bonaparte reportedly expressed a desire to see the mummies himself during his Italian campaigns. Whether he did so remains uncertain, but the fact that the rumour circulated speaks to their growing reputation.
Despite growing interest, no definitive explanation emerged. The phenomenon appeared to be specific to Venzone. Similar conditions elsewhere did not reliably produce the same results.
The fungal hypothesis and early theories
The most detailed early attempt to explain the mummification came from F. Savorgnan de Brazza, whose essay appeared in the French journal Cosmos and was translated into English by The Literary Digest in 1906.
De Brazza outlined the known facts. The bodies were buried in wooden coffins. The crypt environment was cool and relatively dry. The remains were exceptionally light and free from decay.
He dismissed simple explanations such as airflow alone. Instead, he proposed that a specific fungus might be responsible. The organism he identified was Hypha bombycina, a fungus known for its remarkable capacity to absorb and retain water.
According to de Brazza, spores of this fungus were commonly found in tombs and wooden coffins. Under the right conditions, it could draw moisture rapidly from a body, halting bacterial decomposition before it could take hold.
At the time, this explanation seemed plausible. Yet de Brazza himself acknowledged its limitations. The precise environmental conditions required for the fungus to thrive were not well understood. More troublingly, the process could not be replicated experimentally.
As The Literary Digest noted, “the conditions that assure its life and reproduction” remained unknown.
Limestone, soil chemistry, and the role of chance
Later researchers proposed additional factors. One was the presence of calcium sulphate and limestone in the soil and flooring of the crypt. Such materials can create alkaline environments that inhibit bacterial activity.
Arthur C. Aufderheide, a professor at the University of Minnesota and an authority on palaeopathology, argued that the original tomb had a native limestone floor. Combined with low humidity and stable temperatures, this could have created ideal conditions for desiccation.
Aufderheide was sceptical of the fungal explanation. His own studies failed to detect Hypha bombycina or any closely related organism on the surviving remains. He suggested that if a fungus had been involved, it may no longer be present or detectable.
The prevailing view among modern scholars is that no single factor explains the mummification. Instead, it was likely the result of a rare convergence of environmental conditions, including temperature stability, humidity control, soil chemistry, coffin materials, and perhaps microbial activity that is no longer fully traceable.
In other words, it was an accident. A perfect one, repeated dozens of times, but never reliably again.
Photography, LIFE magazine, and a global audience
For centuries, knowledge of the mummies spread slowly through academic and ecclesiastical networks. That changed dramatically in the 1950s.
An American photographer named Jack Birns was travelling through the Alps when he lost his way and ended up in Venzone. Looking for somewhere to stay the night, he wandered into the village and encountered a scene that seemed almost unreal.
An elderly man sat calmly drinking tea beside a mummified body.
Birns photographed the moment. He went on to document daily life in Venzone, capturing images of villagers interacting with their preserved ancestors with casual affection rather than fear.
These photographs were published in LIFE magazine, one of the most widely read publications in the world at the time. The images caused a sensation. For many readers, it was the first time they had seen mummies treated not as museum specimens, but as members of a living community.
The photographs transformed the mummies of Venzone from a regional curiosity into an international phenomenon.
Earthquake and loss in 1976
On the 6th of May, 1976, disaster struck. A powerful earthquake devastated Friuli, killing nearly 1,000 people and levelling entire towns. Venzone was almost completely destroyed. Its medieval walls collapsed. The cathedral was reduced to rubble.
The mummies were not spared. Many were crushed beneath falling stone. Others were damaged beyond recovery. Of the 21 intact mummies that had been documented before the earthquake, only 15 were retrieved from the wreckage.
The loss was not only cultural but scientific. Each destroyed mummy represented a vanished opportunity to study the phenomenon further. With burial in churches long banned, no new examples could ever be created.
As one commentator noted after the earthquake, the number of mummies would now only ever decline.
The mummies today
Today, five of the mummies are on display in the crypt of the baptistery of San Michele in Venzone. They are carefully conserved, protected from light, humidity, and handling.
They date from between 1348 and 1881, spanning more than five centuries of local history. Their clothing, posture, and physical condition provide valuable insights into the health, occupations, and social status of Friuli’s past inhabitants.
Yet access remains limited. Researchers have often found it difficult to obtain permission to collect samples. Aufderheide himself remarked that while the people of Venzone were “incredibly hospitable,” those responsible for the mummies were understandably cautious.
What remains is a balance between scientific curiosity and respect for what these bodies represent. They are not laboratory specimens alone. They are ancestors.
An unresolved mystery
Despite advances in forensic science, microbiology, and archaeology, there is still no definitive explanation for the mummification of the Venzone bodies.
No experiment has successfully reproduced the process. No single cause has been universally accepted. The fungus may or may not have played a role. Limestone may or may not have been essential. The precise humidity levels may never be known.
What is clear is that Venzone offers a rare example of how communities once lived alongside death without fear, and how modern science can still be humbled by historical accidents.
The mummies endure not because they were meant to, but because circumstances aligned in a way that no one planned and no one has fully explained since.
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