Every society develops distinct strategies to ensure the acceptance of bodily decomposition and manage the dead body, often accommodating a plurality of attitudes within a single cultural system. For example, in the Early Modern Era, Sicilian Capuchins not only buried the deceased but also occasionally mummified them and displayed their intact corpses. This peculiar practice gave rise, from its very beginning, to a secondary form of engagement: ante litteram tourism. Today, what was once a secondary and ancillary dimension has become the predominant one. The display of human remains, in fact, can acquire meanings that extend beyond funerary or commemorative purposes, ranging from relic veneration to museum exhibition. These transformations have been driven by systematic processes of re–signification in accordance with contemporary principles of cultural heritage. A new “secular” sacred dimension now supplements the traditional “religious” one, as the original devotional inviolability is recontextualized within the presentday “museum inviolability”, without being entirely supplanted. Tourism (cultural tourism, religious tourism, and especially dark tourism) operates within this multilayered semantic framework, moving beyond purely didactic aims to create a space wherein visitors actively choose to engage with the material traces of death.
Keywords: Mummies; Heritage–making; Dark tourism