Jan 11th, 2017: Rosalia Lombardo

[xoxoxoBruce]

Is there anything as cherubic as a sleeping two year old. Especially when she winks several times a day.
A day? Yes, a neat trick since she's been dead 97 years.

Rosalia Lombardo was only two years old when she died from pneumonia in 1920. Her premature death left her father so heartbroken that he approached the noted embalmer, Alfredo Salafia, and asked him to preserve Rosalia’s body. Alfredo Salafia, a skillful embalmer and taxidermist, performed such an excellent operation on Rosalia that nearly a hundred years after her death, the little girl appears to be merely dozing beneath the glass case in the Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo, Italy, where she rests.

But, but Blinking? C'mon, really?

It’s thought that changes in temperature inside the crypt causes her eyelids to contract producing the blinking effect. But Capuchin Catacombs’s curator, Dario Piombino-Mascali, has a different theory. Piombino-Mascali believes that Rosalia’s blinking eyes is an optical illusion caused by the angle at which the light from the windows strike her. As the day progresses and the direction of the light changes, Rosalia appears to open and close her eyes several times throughout the day.

OK, but why is she so well preserved?

Unlike typical embalming, where the internal organs are removed and the empty cavities filled with natron salts to completely desiccate the body, Salafia made a small puncture in the body and injected a mixture of formalin, zinc salts, alcohol, salicylic acid, and glycerin. Each ingredient in the concoction performed a unique job. The formalin killed all the bacteria, the glycerin ensured that her body didn’t desiccate, and the salicylic acid wiped out any fungi in the flesh. The magic ingredient was the zinc salts that petrified Rosalia’s body giving it rigidity and prevented her cheeks and nasal cavities from caving in.

Now you know how to annoy your family forever.

Link

[Griff]

humans are creepy

[fargon]

What Griff said.