Chiesa di Santa Maria Immacolata

The Chiesa di Santa Maria Immacolata, on the Via Veneto in Rome, is the church of the Capuchin friars and one of the city's most singular religious sites. Its lower level contains the famous Capuchin Crypt, a series of small chapels decorated with the bones of approximately four thousand friars exhumed between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. The arrangement, which covers walls and ceilings in intricate patterns of skulls, vertebrae, and pelvic bones, was intended as a meditation on mortality rather than a spectacle, and it remains one of the most thought-provoking spaces in Rome.

The current experience, Opera: Capuchins Crypt, Music Art and Mystery, brings live music into this extraordinary setting, pairing the visual intensity of the crypt with operatic performance. The combination draws on the site's long association with contemplation and the arts, the Capuchin order having maintained a presence here since the church was consecrated in 1631. The result is an encounter with Rome's Baroque heritage that is both architectural and musical.