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Wanderlust
Turning Parisienne
In Paris for our fifth anniversary, all I could think was: What's so seductive about French women? And how can I become one?
By J.A. Getzlaff
[10/29/99]

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Holy hassle
Getting to the Vatican for New Year's Mass, plus advice for first-time cruisers and Auckland sightseers.
By Donald D. Groff
[10/28/99]

I booked it online
From mega-travel agencies to boutique sites, the Internet has exploded consumers' hotel-booking options. But what do the different sites really offer? And where are the hidden treasures?
By Judy Jacobs
[10/27/99]

Letter from Ladakh
The rugged inhabitants of this starkly beautiful, isolated land are now preparing for the latest invader: Winter.
By Steve Van Beek
[10/26/99]

Eating Iberia
A junket whore survives (and transcribes) the pleasures and punishments of anti-travel in Spain and Portugal.
By Douglas Cruickshank
[10/23/99]

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My husband wants to wear them for Halloween every year, but I never let him. I got them from a Native American, so somehow they seem better than Halloween. They need a display case.

I also keep the skull of a bull -- a great, white, sun-bleached thing with foot-long horns the color of dry hay. I kept it on the wall for a long time, but now I keep it hidden high on top of a bookcase, where I think to look on it only once or twice a year.

I have seen more bones than most people will in a lifetime. I have looked on the skeletons of thousands of people, some put up like wallpaper, some assembled as furniture, others poking from the deteriorating ends of mummies, and still more displayed bare and unadorned, except for their simple gossamer coats spurned by long-dead spiders.

I am especially drawn to displays of bones -- grand, magnificent displays that artists have erected in the chapels and ossuaries that adorn Europe like bright baubles for the religious and the curious alike. Until a few years ago, I didn't even know that these showcases, these "bone chapels," existed. Now I hunt these European oddities with a relish that startles even my liberal-minded friends. And though I have now seen more skeletons than perhaps anyone should, each time I successfully track down a new display, I find myself completely captivated, completely enamored, as if it were my first time.

Eight years ago, I boarded a jet for Europe. I wanted to take it all in, to soak in the culture that for so long I had only imagined from my side of the Atlantic. Together, my husband and I walked the streets, traveled the trains, spent hours absorbed in Notre-Dame, slipped and slid down a glacier in Interlocken, were trapped long past dark in the mummified remains of Pompeii before the Italian security guards snatched us out.

Pompeii. Now that I look back, maybe that is where my fascination with bones began to form, to coalesce from the dirt and ash and pumice that littered the ancient streets. In Pompeii, those who were trapped when the volcano erupted, who couldn't or didn't leave, were coated so completely with powdery white ash that their bodies permanently froze into their last contortions before death. These figures are displayed today in clear coffin-like boxes, where one can see the ash-coated mother defiantly protecting her ash-coated child, the slave curled in agony as the ash suffocated his lungs.

These few bodies left behind are emblematic of the city itself. Like them, the city is similarly entombed. Pompeii is a dead city, a mummified city, a relic. All that's left of the thriving commerce and busy citizenry are the skeletal remains of houses. To crouch alone in the cobbled streets in the damp, dark evening air is to feel the weight of its lassitude surround and penetrate you. It is a quiet city, an empty city -- a city of death.

After Pompeii, I began searching out more such oases of death, propelled by a morbid curiosity and some small, gentle push from something else unnamable in my mind. I searched, too, for that feeling of being held in a cradle of such utter lifelessness, of otherworldliness, that Pompeii had evoked. I found it in the bone chapels.

Next page | At a Capuchin cemetery in Rome