Inside the Confraternity of Death, Opened by Appointment

There is a church on Via Giulia with skulls carved on its front. It has been closed for over a decade. On this walk, the nun of the confraternity opens it, and the crypt beneath it, for the group. That is the reason to book this rather than one of the other dark-history walks. Down there are chandeliers made from human bones and the skulls of the confraternity's brothers and sisters, each with a name cut into the forehead. The Confraternity of Death still exists. Its work was collecting the bodies found in the streets and pulled out of the Tiber, people nobody claimed, and giving them a burial. The rest of the walk is real history rather than invented ghost stories: public executions, deaths that turned into legends, popes who were worse than their reputations, and the machinery a city needs when its dead outnumber the people willing to bury them. It runs through the back streets after the crowds have gone, starting at Piazza Trilussa in Trastevere, crossing Ponte Sisto and working through Piazza Farnese, Campo de' Fiori and Piazza Navona.