The Italian architect and photographer Ugo Villani merges his disciplines to showcase ‘Refrisco all’anema d’o priatorio’ (en: Refreshment for the Souls in Purgatory), a compelling visual project centered on Purgatory as a metaphor.

Delving into the Fontanelle Cemetery of Naples, an ossuary hosting the bones of around 40,000 victims of plague and cholera epidemics spanning more than two centuries, Villani offers insight into the legacy of the late 19th-century Canon Don Gaetano Barbati. With the help of local women, Barbati meticulously organized the mass graveyard to afford the dead proper rest and dignity.

Through black-and-white photography and seemingly random points of interest, the photographer mirrors the same blend of curiosity and reverence that Barbati displayed generations ago. There is a documentary, almost investigative feel to his shots; while the photographs preserve the original spirit and purpose of the ossuary, they simultaneously highlight the contrasts and geometric wonders captured through the precise eye of an architect.

Villani’s exclusively monochrome portfolio holds space for sacrum and profanum alike. Sometimes they intertwine, like in the featured series. Purgatory, a state of limbo between heaven and hell, is for the soul what an open morgue is for human remains. Not an active part of the world of the living, yet unearthed amongst them, calling for compassion and connection. It is a state of (non)existence floating in the air of medieval macabre.

The artworks carry a Dantesque quality, with skulls and bones stacked up in circles straight from “Inferno.” This bleak neatness is a depiction of the intrinsic human need for categorization and rationalization of great mysteries of existence, death being the greatest of them all. Perhaps interacting with the purgatory souls through rituals around their earthly remains brings the living some comfort that they as well won’t leave this world completely.

Artist’s Note:

“‘Refrisco all’anema d’o priatorio’: Refreshment for the Souls in Purgatory

At the Cimitero delle Fontanelle in Naples, death is not a closed sentence. It remains as a presence, request, and waiting. A skull without a name, placed before the living, becomes someone again.

Carved into the ancient tuff quarries of the Rione Sanità, the Fontanelle is a vast ossuary where, over the centuries, human remains from common graves, epidemics, poverty, and anonymity were gathered. The place is not only an archive of death. It is a fragile theater of care, where bones, crosses, votive inscriptions, and small shrines reveal one of Naples’s most singular devotional practices: the cult of the ‘anime pezzentelle,’ the poor souls of Purgatory.

The modern history of the site is linked to Don Gaetano Barbati, who, in the late nineteenth century, helped reorganize the anonymous remains with the support of devoted women from the neighborhood. Through that act of order and compassion, the ossuary became part of a deeper popular ritual.

“Refrisco all’anema d’o priatorio” means offering relief to a soul in Purgatory. At the Fontanelle, this relief is not abstract. It becomes a gesture. A ‘capuzzella,’ a small skull, may be chosen, cleaned, protected, and prayed for. In return, the soul may offer dreams, guidance, protection, or simply the possibility of a bond.

These photographs move through that threshold: between dust and devotion, abandonment and recognition, matter and prayer. They do not look at death as a spectacle but as a relationship still active in the shadows. Here, memory is not written only in names. Sometimes it survives in a skull, a coin, a cross, and in the stubborn human need to care for what history has left behind.”