In this tour de force of original cultural history Paul Koudounaris takes the reader on an unprecedented international tour of macabre & devotional architectural masterpieces in nearly 20 countries This is the first book to bring together the world's most important charnel sites ranging from the crypts of the Capuchin monasteries in Italy & the skull-encrusted columns of the ossuary in Evora in Portugal to the strange tomb of a 1960s wealthy Peruvian nobleman decorated with the exhumed skeletons of his Spanish ancestors Illustrated with specially taken photographs of sites rarely open to the public & forgotten archive images of others long destroyed this mesmerising shocking & deeply moving book is an essential memento mori for our modern age