Historians of religions and ethnographers have always regarded the death of an individual as a social deed. Something that determines a deep crisis; not only in the family group but also in the descent, in the clan and the tribe. It is for this reason that the social structures react to death with a number of means,  both mythical and ritual, that are supposed to help the individuals to undergo the event according to the models provided by the society in which they live.

Cripta dei Cappuccini ©Giovanni Piesco
Cripta dei Cappuccini, Palermo, Italy 2013.
“How many memories of common grief
of common joy! What a new living in the years
which so soon went by! In the meanwhile a sigh
goes up, a long evident sob, low and resounding
in the arcades to which those cold bodies seem
to answer: the two worlds are divided by a little
opening, and life and death were never so united.”
Ippolito Pindemonte 1777 in his epistle ‘I Sepolcri’