Seductive Bodies: the Glamour of Death between Myth and Tourism

Seductive Bodies:the Glamour of Deathbetween Myth and Tourism

MARXIANO MELOTTI

05 MELOTTI 101_128.qxd:02CASTORINA 33_58 16-10-2013 11:59 Pagina 101

Marxiano Melotti

AbstractThe discovery of the mummy of Tutankhamun, one of the first great me-

dia events of archaeology, as well as the success of Ötzi, advertised treasureof the Museum of Bolzano, or the ever green fascination of the “anatomicalmachines” due to the Prince of Sansevero show an interesting aspect of thetourism and society. Western culture seems to be invaded by the tourist cultof death. Even the “bodies” of the victims of Pompeii, actually mere casts giv-ing shape to the void, have been essential for the tourist success of the site,as well as the pilgrimage to the “uncorrupted” corpse of Padre Pio, actuallycovered by a silicon mask created by the experts of Madame Tussauds Mu-seum, show some cultural dynamics where artefact prevails on reality, the“nothing” over the object and emotion over the content. The global successof the exhibitions “Body Worlds”, which display “real human bodies”, invitesus to reflect on the historical path of the musealisation of death and, in abroader sense, of some dynamics of the present “liquid society”, where edu-cation and entertainment, tourism and market, culture and leisure intertwineand hybridize.

Seductive Bodies: theGlamour of the Death betweenMyth andTourism*

The bodies of the deceased erase the boundary-line between cultureand nature, art and life, vision and eyesight.

Seamus Heaney1

In search of the “otherness”Spectres, or rather corps, are haunting Europe. This is due to a travelling

exhibition: “Body Worlds. The Original Exhibition of Real Human Bodies”.It displays, as one of the editors of its catalogue explains, “something unusual”:“anatomical specimens, produced and preserved according to a new process de-veloped by Gunther von Hagens”2. This collection, shown for the first time inGermany in 1997, has increasingly expanded over the years and has becomea true mass phenomenon, with exhibitions simultaneously held in differenttowns and hundreds of thousands of visitors all over the world3. The show, ofcourse, step by step, has received “enthusiastic acceptance and vehement re-jection”: its undoubted educational value ‒ it teaches to overcome the taboo ofdeath and to better understand and treat our bodies ‒ is accompanied by a spec-

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tacularization of death and, morespecifically, of the human bodies,which should make us reflect onthe relationship of our society withdeath.

But is it really necessary toovercome this taboo? or, as alsothe success of this exhibitionshows, has our society already sub-stantially overcome it and, thanksto the continuous bombardment ofstrong images in films and televi-sion, has become able to live death as an entertainment with a leisure dimen-sion of cultural and tourist character? And, if so, does it really make sense en-joying ourselves with death?

The death tourism has already developed on such a scale that some schol-ars have even coined a term, “dark tourism”, to describe the tourist experiencesthat, in various ways, have to do with death or, in a broader sense, with pain4:visits to battlefields and concentration camps and trips to sites of natural dis-asters or murders, not to mention some more sophisticated forms, apparentlynot directly related to death, involving tours to places of extreme poverty ordanger, such as the favelas or some underground missile bases. Their commondenominator is the desire of “seeing” death: they are places that have hostedor are hosting it or may cause it. Of course, in the history of the European cul-ture, the world of death and the dead tends to be taboo: we get rid of the deadbodies in a hurry, we relegate them in special places, we perform rites to givesense to the detachment between the living and the dead and, above all, to de-fine a clear and possibly insurmountable barrier between the two worlds.

However, also the exact opposite is true. In the Western world the death andthe dead have always been next to the living, and, in spite of what was said inthe presentation of von Hagen’s exhibition, seeing death or the dead is not atall “unusual”, even in tourist activities. We can even say that tourism was bornwith the death not only in metaphorical terms ‒ travelling to see beyond ‒ butalso in concrete terms: the ancient visited the shrines and tombs of heroes, justlike the grand tourists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries visited graves,cemeteries and funerary monuments and the modern tourists continue to do.Archaeological museums exhibit objects mostly coming from funerary en-

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Dead bodies as a show: the exhibition “Body Worlds”(Rome, 2012)


dowment and the archaeologi-cal sites are, very often, tracesof places that no longer exist.The archaeological and cul-tural tourism are essentiallydeath tourism.

The same thing may be saidfor the “bodies” of the past.Von Hagen uses a techniquecertainly rather innovative and“stages” the bodies in a “new”way, in athletic and extremely

vital attitudes that, by reversing the cultural image of the still and composeddead body, can leave the public dazed. However, Europe, since medievaltimes, is accustomed to interact with the mummified bodies of the Saints and,as the success of the exhibitions of Padre Pio’s corpse shows, still has a greatinterest in these practices. Similarly, the modern “discovery” of ancient Egyptat the end of the eighteenth century introduced the Egyptian mummies into ourimagery, making them protagonists in exhibitions and museums. We mighteven assert that exactly the collections of these mummies have “popularized”some important museums.

Gunther von Hagen, however, goes further. His “plastinated” bodies leadus into the heart of a more recent phenomenon, “edutainment”, i.e. the inter-connection of education and entertainment: one of the most interesting aspectsof the post-modern culture. Von Hagen in fact organizes “exhibitions”, i.e. cul-tural events of traditional character and traditionally oriented to education thatare also “shows”, belonging to the complex media dimension of contemporarysociety. His bodies, without skin and with muscles, bones and internal organsexposed, plastically modeled while playing a guitar, kicking a ball or playingcards, make show. The body of a pregnant woman with the foetus inside it, aswell as the number of foetuses exhibited in their developmental order, are firstof all a “show”, which arouses discussions and debates affecting some of themost delicate and controversial ethical, cultural and political issues, such asabortion and euthanasia. And so they attract the public.

Similarly, the newspapers of the cities that temporarily house these exhi-bitions, to tickle the public, highlight their most morbid and controversial as-pects, with true or false notes. Hence the news that von Hagen for his creations

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A tourist success. Egyptian Mummies in the BritishMuseum


would use corpses of executed Chinese or that, at his request, he would haveplastinated the corpse of Michael Jackson. It is the “liquid” culture of con-temporary society, where history, ethical issues and gossip intertwine and hy-bridize5. The post-modern aspect of these exhibitions was rightly pointed outby a clever Italian observer, who has defined von Hagen’s commercial oper-ation as an “outlet of plastic resurrection”6. In fact, von Hagen would have evenconsidered the possibility of selling plastinated anatomical parts as souvenirs.Once more, culture, education and commercial aspects seem inseparable.

The success of the exhibition is definitely due to voyeurism: the morbid in-terest in death that cultural tourism channels and makes socially acceptable.But, paradoxically, such a “museum display” of the body reduces, if not can-cels completely, the impact of the dark show. Von Hagen’s plastinated bod-ies, with their labels and date of creation, become sculptures and eventuallyloose their macabre “otherness”. All the more so, since the sophisticated tech-nique of plastination adopted ends up making bodies so “real” that, accordingto many visitors, they seem to be made in plastic. This is a paradox of the im-age society, which takes the artifice as its model and nourish itself with un-precedented forms of hybrid authenticity. In short, Von Hagen has created hisown fortune using edutainment as a mirror, but this mirror has eventually de-stroyed the strength and uniqueness of its exhibitions, by assimilating them tothe usual models of traditional cultural and educational tourism.

But whence comes this interest in the world of death? The answer, as al-ways, is to be found in the great classics. There-fore, it is worth dwelling upon one of the found-ing texts of the European culture, where wefind some basic elements of our imagery:Homer’s Odyssey.

Ulysses, in the most dramatic moment of hisjourney, had to visit the world of the dead. Itwas the so-called nekuia (νέκυια)7. After tenyears of travels to worlds unknown, always atthe borders of civilization, he must cross the lastthreshold and visit the world of the dead. Hemust see the dead and talk with them. It was theonly way to find his way and to return to his is-land, his home and his wife; briefly, to returncompletely to the civilized world.


Body, Death and Tourism: the poster of“BodyWorlds”


The Odyssey, in fact, is the story of a grand rite of passage, where the en-counter with distant peoples and monstrous creatures is a metaphor for the needof all individuals to get in touch with the “otherness” to acquire knowledge, todiscover their own identity and to be eventually re-aggregated to their own worldwith a new level of awareness and a new social role8. The poem emphasizes theimportance of travel and contact with the “otherness” for knowledge.

Ulysses meets the Cyclops, Circe, the Sirens etc. But this is not enough tolet him regain his identity. He must make the extreme trip, he must pass the lasttest. So he faces a partly real and partly dreamlike journey to the world of death.The journey toward death, and in this case “looking” at it, is a fundamental riteof passage with a strong identity value and an important educational meaning.The death, the other side of our existence, completes the pre-existing knowl-edge with that of the “other” world.

The trip is quite interesting. Ulysses meets souls that are both tangible andintangible. They are ethereal and dreamlike creatures, but at the same time arebodies that drink blood. Homer, in short, raises these questions: how to repre-sent the contact with the dead? how to make it material a dreamlike experience?

This trip ‒ one of the first representations of the need of the living to interactwith the dead ‒ breaks a taboo. After death the bodies of the deceased get outof our world and must remain outside it in order to give sense both to them-selves and to us. The funeral is a ritual of detachment marking this separation.

The return of the dead represents the rupture of an order and of a balance.The dead who return can only be ghosts or spirits to be exorcised or, in somecases, extraordinary beings to be honoured and venerated or adored.

This is the case of the Christian religion. At its basis there is the return ofa body from the world of the dead: an exceptional and unrepeatable event thattestifies the both human and divine nature of that body and founds its cult.

Ulysses’ journey is also a metaphor and a model of an important ritual experi-ence that European culture has always emphasized: the initiatory journey into theother world, the search of contact with the beyond, which can take the form of a riteof passage or, in our world, of tourism and, in particular, archaeological tourism.From this point of view, Gunther von Hagens’ exhibition may be considered the cul-mination of a cultural experience inspired to a centuries-old collective need.

The relationship with death and with the bodies of the dead, however, en-tails an ambiguous and conflicting relationship: it attracts and repels, it bringsan important knowledge but at the same time is dangerous and contaminant,and therefore must be absolutely avoided or exorcised.



Mummies. From eternity to tourismThe presence of dead bodies in our world is conceivable only in quite spe-

cific forms. This is, in particular, the case of the mummies. The body of the de-ceased is crystallized in a space between the worlds: it is in our world (you cansee it, you can touch it) but, at the same time, it is already in the afterlife.

Yet, in the Egyptian world this did not imply a reversal of the balance: thebody of the deceased remained materially and eternally present in the world,but in a special space: the city of the dead, the cemetery, the grave dug in therock or, for the happy few, enclosed in inaccessible pyramids.

With the mummy there was a technical contact, when it was created, anda ritual contact, when it was honoured and then locked up in its special space,but there were no permanent experiential contacts.

Archaeology and tourism have somehow altered this relationship. When,starting from the eighteenth century and with greater intensity between the endof the nineteenth century and the twentieth century, French and English ar-chaeologists began to dig and open the ancient tombs in Egypt, they re-brought the mummified bodies to our world.

The success of the Egyptian civilization in popular culture owes much tothe mummies. Let us think about the tours in the early nineteenth-centuryBritain of an Italian archaeologist and adventurer, Giovanni Battista Belzoni9:together with treasures, relics and casts of works of art, he brought with himsome mummies, which attracted a huge crowd. Ancient Egypt was soon re-thought and defined as the “mysteriouscivilization of death”.

Obviously, these findings were im-pressive for their deep symbolic value.After two or three thousand years,through the dead we could go back incontact with the living of that time.These bodies created a sort of directchannel with the culture of the ancientEgypt and, in particular, with its people,regarded as an alive whole of men,women and children: something muchstronger than a contact through other ar-chaeological finds.

Of course, even in this new use, the


A new business. Mummies for sale


mummies have maintained their primary function of powerful communicationtools between the worlds (in this case between the modern world and the an-cient world), but in our secularized age they have lost their ritual function andhave entered the new contexts of science, museums and tourism. From “sub-jects” of a ritual existence inside the tomb, they have become serial “objects”of scientific research and tourist gaze.

On the other hand, in our world, even the emotional relationship remainsstuck and neutralized in a dimension of aesthetic use, in museums or tourist ac-tivities. Moreover, the mummification itself involves a process of transfor-mation of the body of the deceased into a sort of monument, and this changesits status. The mummified body appears frozen in time and becomes alien tothe transformations that affect the existence of the living.

The mummified body, in our culture, becomes a sort of work of art, a mon-ument to the “otherness”, which, acquiring the harmless traits of the archaeo-logical finds and historical evidence, fascinates and perhaps inspires some fears,but in fact does not really frighten.

This special “neutral” relationship that we have established with the mum-mies (which move between fascination and repulsion, acceptance and rejection,but are firmly inserted in paths of aesthetic enjoyment in museums and tourism)is endangered by the return of the ritual dimension in the new multicultural so-ciety. An example: the mummified bodies of so-called “primitive” people,

which are displayed in our museums orcome to light during new excavations,more and more often are claimed by themembers of those populations as “bod-ies” and “persons” and are no longer re-garded only as anthropological docu-ments or archaeological finds10. In thesecases, the old cultural constructions thathave led us to neutralize the symbolicvalue of the corpses and to accept themas social objects, even usable in leisurecontexts, suddenly vanish and let us torediscover the taboo of death and tofeel horror for their display in museumsand tourist use.

An important moment in the


The birth of a myth. Howard Carter in the tombof Tutankhamun


process of tourist reinvention ofdeath was certainly the discov-ery in 1922 of the Tomb of Tu-tankhamen by Howard Carter.This tomb, with its magnificenttreasures and its rich sarcophagi,immediately exerted a disruptiveeffect on the collective imagery11.Within a few weeks that tomb be-came object of tourist pilgrim-ages, which obliged Carter to sus-pend his excavations. A series ofaccidents and fatalities that accompanied the works started the myth of the“Curse of Tutankhamen”, due to one of the first campaign of media marketing‒ a myth which, after a century, is still periodically fed by entertainment lit-erature, films and television programmes and does not seem to lose its ef-fectiveness12. Since then, the popular image of Egypt is linked to the worldof mummies and sarcophagi and to their supposed magical power ‒ a sort ofmodern, secularized version, due to media and tourism, of the symbolic andritual power of the dead in the ancient world.

But we must avoid the mistake of thinking about a modern world over-whelmed by the myth of Tut and the magic of the Egyptian mummies. For a longwhile tens of thousands mummies were used in British houses as low-cost fuel.In fact, there is an interesting dualism: on the one hand, the fascination for theworld of death and the transformation of the bodies into museum pieces, withmedia coverage of the mummies as a channel of communication with the past;and, on the other hand, the detachment and estrangement from these mummies,if not the suspicion and contempt for them. This clearly shows that the myth ofthe mummies is a cultural construction with specific functions, which works onlyin certain contexts of aesthetic, educational and museum use.

We are now in a new space: that of tourism, where some symbolic and ex-periential elements of the traditional and religious culture persist (such as therites of passage and the search for the “otherness”), but other elements havevanished or were weakened and placed in a new leisure context.

The dark side of the EnlightenmentIn the history of the use and display of the human body, we must recall the


The birth of a myth. Howard Carter in the tomb ofTutankhamun


Prince of Sansevero, whose “anatomical machines” are sometimes mentionedas illustrious antecedents of Von Hagens’ work.

He lived in Naples, which, thirty years before the French Revolution, wasa culturally vibrant town, in spite of its contradictions. As for the issue con-cerned, then Naples had a very special relationship with the world of death andspirits and was pervaded by cults, beliefs and superstitions (which in part per-sist) linked to the dead and their mortal remains.

The Prince was a typical exponent of the cultured aristocracy of the lateeighteenth century: a pre-Enlightenment intellectual, an alchemist, a Mason,a Rosicrucian, almost totally immersed in a magical-scientific atmosphere13.Now all this may appear ridiculous, but then it seemed to be dangerously rev-olutionary. But, first and foremost, he was an inventor, who is still rememberedfor his “useless” inventions, such as the blue colour for the fireworks and afloating horse-drawn coach. Anyhow, he was one of the first researchers in-terested in leisure, amusement and entertainment.

In 1763, with the help of an anatomist, Giuseppe Salerno, he created two“anatomical machines”: two human bodies, a male and a female, with an ap-parently intact circulatory system, which, according to some people, he ob-tained with a technique somehow similar to Von Hagens’. Near the body of thewoman originally there was even a “small body of a foetus”, still attached tothe placenta through the umbilical cord. In fact, Von Hagens was not the firstto pay a particular attention to the female body and motherhood, combining sci-entific curiosity and voyeurism.

These machines were impressive creatures,without a clear status (skeletons, mummies,sculptures?). Their use was primarily aesthetic,satisfying the intellectual pleasure of artifice andtechnique. However they were also a scientificchallenge to faith. In a context that had begun tobecome secularized, Sansevero gave a secularanswer to the Catholic worship of relics.

Obviously, these two creations had a strongimpact on the collective imagery; all the more sobecause (unlike the Christian relics and the Egypt-ian mummies) they did not come from an un-known elsewhere in space and time, but from a lab-oratory situated in the city, in the basement of a


An "anatomical machine" createdby the Prince of Sansevero


patrician palace.Sansevero, disliked by the Church, was accused of creating these two ma-

chines by injecting a metalizing substance in bodies still living. In addition, thepopular voice blamed him for using them in his magic and Masonic rituals.With these allegations the two machines got out of the area of scientific ex-periments to become judicial evidence of a supposed double murder and wererelocated within the traditional area of religious and magic practices. Europewas not yet ready to accept a use of death for merely recreational and aestheticpurposes.

The casts and the invention of PompeiiFrom this point of view, it is quite interesting what then began to happen

in the nearby Pompeii. As well-known, this ancient Roman town was buriedby an eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. After centuries of neglect, its remainswere identified in the eighteenth century and in 1748 the excavations began.During them, the remains of the victims of that eruption came to light period-ically and this started an interesting process of popular and media reinvention14.

It is worth recalling the discovery in 1768 of the remains of eighteen bod-ies. One of them was immediately presented by the press as a wealthy Romanmatron, killed by the eruption while she was secluded with a gladiator, her se-cret lover.

This combination of love and death and archaeology and gossip was im-mediately successful and drew the attention of the general public. To the fas-cination for death, which, as we have already said, has a profound initiatoryvalue, it added an element of erotic character, which helped to make the con-tact with the world of death even more attractive.

Also voyeurism played an important role. We can recall a significant ex-ample: in 1772 the remains of a female body and the shape of the ash and lapillicompressed where once there was her breast suggested to “cut” the ground andto make a mould of it. This strange object was placed in a museum. Its intrin-sically morbid significance was clearly showed in 1852 by a French writer,Théophile Gautier. In one of his tales, he gave a name to that body, Arria Mar-cella, and imagined the story of a tourist who visited the museum and, excitedby that breast, felled in love with the non-existent girl and travelled to Pom-peii in search of her, between dream and reality, body and ghost15.

In 1863, in Italy, which two years before had become a kingdom of re-spectable extension thanks to the annexation of the former Kingdom of the Two



Sicilies, including the area of Pom-peii, the new director of the excava-tions, Giuseppe Fiorelli, recreated thearchaeological site of Pompeii andtransformed it into a site of touristinterest with the introduction of anadmission fee. Moreover, he dividedthe archaeological area into blocksand attributed unambiguous names totheir streets and houses, giving it theform of a museum-city. The openarea, which was placed in spatial con-tinuity with the surrounding country-side and was romantically endowedwith ruins in permanent excavation,became a real “site”: a symbolically

closed and special space allowing the magical and initiatory contact with theworld of death and with the past, of course after the payment of a “bourgeois”ticket.

This innovation marks the transition of the area from the Grand Tour of thepre-Romantic and Romantic age to the modern cultural tourism. Fiorelli gavethe newly united Italy a large archaeological site of great national and identityinterest. But, of course, that good intention had to be followed by some con-crete outcomes. Realizing that the peculiarity of Pompeii was its special rela-tionship with death and, above all, the way travellers, poets and scholars “rep-resented” the area, he thought to nurture this collective idea of Pompeii withnew and even more intriguing images. Thus he instrumentally introduced hiscasts, well aware of their impact on tourism. He had the intuition of representingdeath in a space which was already partially based on “represented” authen-ticity. In fact, he transformed the site into a museum of death, by crystallizingits image in that of a large crypt. This made Pompeii a real “city of death”: anoperation where the images of the bodies have played a key role.

This voyeuristic tension of tourism ‒ or, rather, of society, but grasped andchannelled by tourism in a special way ‒ is a constitutive element of our pres-ent. Perhaps, the most telling examples of this relationship are exactly the Pom-peii “bodies”: the casts, which, according to the collective construction con-solidated in the last two centuries, we are used to consider as the bodies of its


The fascination of death. Casts in the archaeo-logical site of Pompeii


ancient inhabitants. The success of Pompeii in the collective imagery largelydepends on these strange objects. But they are not bodies: they are neithercorpses nor mummies. They are simply casts obtained by filling the vacuumleft by the bodies buried by the volcano ash and lapilli and later decomposedin the ground16. These casts, often of twisted and disquieting shapes, whichseem to have fixed in a timeless dimension men, women, children and animalsin their desperate struggle against death, are “artefacts” due to the imaginationand to the subtle entrepreneurial spirit of an archaeologist.

The highly dramatic aspect of the casts, which immediately entered the pub-lic image of Pompeii, was due to the contraction of the muscles caused by thevery high temperature of the ash cloud that invested the bodies17. However, wemust not underestimate Fiorelli’s operation, which was attentively built pay-ing great attention to media and tourism: something that today appears quitenormal and would go unnoticed, since we are totally accustomed to this kindof use of the darkest interests of tourism by advertising and even cultural mar-keting.

Among the first casts made in 1863 there was one of a female body, foundwith a silver ring and gold earrings, which soon acquired fame as a prostituteor, because of the effect on the belly of what has been interpreted as the skirtgathered up about the hips, as “the pregnant woman”. So, the same cast ac-quired a strong identity in the collective imagery, now responding to the titil-lating model of the Arria Marcella’s sensual breast and now proceeding in thewake of the gloomy pregnant body created by Sansevero. In the 1875 the “preg-nant woman” disappeared and was substituted by the cast of “a young and beau-tiful victim of the eruption”, as was defined by the famous Italian archaeolo-gist Amedeo Maiuri18. Ashas been noticed, noveltyand physical beauty be-came the keys to the pop-ularity of the casts, whichdefine a new era in thehistory of the interpreta-tions of Pompeii19.

The apparent bodiesactually are masks of thevacuum or, if you prefer,masks of death. Techni-


The musealisation of the bodies. Cast in the Antiquarium ofPompeii. Photo by G. Sommier (1834-1914)


cally, however, in spite of the attention that has been paid to them and their dis-play in museums, they are not archaeological finds. They are the visualizationof what we want to see, when going into an archaeological site. They are ex-pression of our desire of contact with death, of our voyeuristic tension and ofa subtle form of sublimated necrophilia, which have transformed the non-findsinto bodies. They are, at the same time, real and non-real, present and absent:virtual images of the body and death, which, in spite of their immaterial ori-gin, are terribly concrete20.

This form of “relative” authenticity is an example of hybrid identity inwhich the body, nothingness, mask, real and virtual objects coexist and appearinseparable.

What are the bodies of Pompeii? And why we have shaped them? They aremasks of death, which satisfy our fantasies and our need to see beyond and tohave contact with the afterlife world.

Bodies in TourOutside the site, people that the mass media have increasingly accustomed

to “see” the death, need much more. Thus the world-wide travelling exhibitionsof the “bodies” of Pompeii, to regain attraction, must use special effects. In theArchaeological Museum of Naples, where one of these travelling exhibitionsstarted its tour, the tourists were greeted by a tremor intended to suggest thesound of an eruption and to create an empathic anxiety for the impendingtragedy, which actually had taken place almost two thousand years before.

In contrast, in Chicago the local organizers chose to emphasize not so muchthe image of human bodies, but rather that of a dog still tied, abandoned by theowner (at least according to the popular myth-making) and “mummified” inthe lapilli. If the autopsy vision of what seems to be a human corpse can be sostrong as to scare or, on the contrary, so banal as to loose its interest, the sightof a helpless little dog always works. The “pet society” of the contemporaryaffluent Western world is readily moved by an animal, while it is often muchcolder and more distrustful in the case of a human, whose death could raise atroublesome sense of guilt.

In New York, in 2011, the humans returned to be protagonists in a show-style exhibition (“Pompeii: Life and Death in the Shadow of Vesuvius”). Vis-itors, after watching interesting but harmless everyday objects, were wel-comed and closed in a tight dark space, a real decantation chamber, where,among the plays of light, sound effects and tremors, were initiated into the most



tragic secrets of the deadtown, to be admitted af-terwards to the specialworld of the next room.Here, in an atmosphere ofsuffused light and sounds,they could see the bodies,sculpturally lying onpodiums apparently“pending” in a scatteredway. The death and itsmasks appeared in aseemingly hyper-emo-tional and experientialway, which was howeverrather anaesthetized. Infact, masks, casts andbodies became sculp-tures, deserving aestheticenjoyment. But we are ina post-modern society,where even the concept(and the experience) ofauthenticity has under-gone a deep process of re-definition. In order to cre-ate a stronger and moreimmersive emotional at-mosphere, the organiser needed a great number of bodies and, probably for theimpossibility of displaying a large number of “original” casts, filled the roomof new casts, which were casts of casts. This way the public, in search of darkemotions, received its sacrifice offering. The most interesting aspect of thewhole exhibition was probably the location: not a traditional museum, but anevent space, Discovery Times Square, where, together with the archaeologi-cal exhibition on Pompeii, hosted an exhibition on Henry Potter, the hero ofthe renowned series of novels and movies presenting a different ‒ but equallyeffective ‒ kind of contact with the “otherness”. Today the lure of dead is a pop-


Emotional tourism. Casts of victims of Vesuvius eruption inPompeii

The emotional gaze. Cast of a dog in Pompeii. Photo by G.Sommier (ca. 1874)


ular diversion, whichcan assume differentshapes: the “liquidity”of present society, inwhich many phenomenatend to lose their bound-aries and seem to merge,produces a range of newindefinite experienceswhere culture and mer-chandising, history andromance, reality and at-

mosphere, death and art are mixed and variously interconnected. In this newframe the magic word is “edutainment”, the liquid connector linking educationand entertainment.

If the artistic sublimation transforms bodies and casts into sculptures andmakes the “masks” objects and findings, we can say that the imaginativeprocess of moulding and masking of nothing started by Fiorelli has found itsfollowers, inspired by the visceral post-modern need of going beyond. Fiorelli’stechnique has recently been replaced by another one, involving the use of trans-parent resins. This allows us to see inside the mass that gives consistency tothe vacuum and to observe the world of death even more closely and to catcha glimpse of the intimate nature of what each mask hides: skeletons, bones andskulls. The interest shown by the public for this technique is indicative of a cul-tural transformation: the visual habit to death somehow makes less effectiveand less interesting the contact with the cast that, for its sculptural aspect, canbe decoded as a simple sculpture. In other words, the audience, which is alreadyeducated by movies and television news and shows with a strong voyeuristicorientation, looks for something more. Here even archaeology absorbs the CSImodel and offers the visitor of museums and the consumer of cultural productsexperience of forensic laboratory. We enter into the cast and see the bones, orto return to the mummy of Tutankhamun, on live television we submit the“corpse” of a pharaoh died thousands of years ago to TAC and analyses offorensic pathology worthy of a TV show, in order to solve the riddle of a mys-terious death and, perhaps, to find a murderer.

This is also the media-oriented setting deliberately implemented by the Mu-seum of Bolzano, in order to maintain the success of the mummy of Ötzi, “the


The Mummy goes to the doctor. Analyses on the body of Ötzi


man from ice” (according to the official definition approved by the Province),“one of the world’s most famous human remains, comparable to the well-known mummies of ancient Egypt”21. The body of this Copper-Age hunter,merchant, metal seeker, shaman-and headman (according to the elastic inter-pretation by the curators of the Museum), dead ‒ perhaps murdered ‒ more than4,000 years ago among the ices of the Schnalstal and found in 1991, is at thecentre of an exciting scientific research that since the beginning, thanks to thepress, has become fictional. The mummy underwent deep and well-publicizedanalyses and “the visitors of the Archaeological Museum can see the video en-doscopy and relive the exciting journey inside the mummy”22. After an inter-national tour, the mummy now rests in the Museum that exhibits it, as the gemof its collection, in a particular cold store, with a small and elegant window,which “allows visitors to ‘peep’ inside”23. Actually, it is only a special show-case, but it entails an estranging effect. The design recalls a furnace and givesthe impression of looking at a dead body in the process of cremation. In short,even in this case, the cultural use of the past moves ambiguously between ed-ucation and entertainment, bordering necrophiliac voyeurism.

The Sleeping BeautyAnother interesting case is the Capuchin Crypt in Palermo: an incredible un-

derground space, created in the late sixteenth century, which houses eight thou-sand mummified bodies: men, women and children; standing and lying; fullydressed and divided according to their gender and social class.

This cemetery lies beneath a church. We are therefore in a religious and fu-nerary context, where the presence and contemplation of death is not surpris-ing. The relatives of the deceased and the believers could go down to these cat-acombs to implement their nekuia.

As in Pompeii, the coming of tourism changed the situation. The bodies ofthe crypt became one of the most famous spots of the Grand Tour. But the“tourist gaze” of the secularized travellers changed the meaning of thosemummies, which, at least for them, were only a macabre show.

Once more here we see the usual dynamics: cultural tourism, in contact withdeath, implements its intrinsic initiatory value, but, at the same time, it acts asa socially acceptable pretext for satisfying voyeurism.

In the same years when in Pompeii some special “creations” became fa-mous, in Palermo there was the “creation” of the mummy of a two-years-old



young girl, Rosalia Lombardo, who died of pneumonia in 1920.Thanks to a special technique (which was identified only in 2009) an em-

balmer, Alfredo Salata, created an extraordinary image: a sort of doll, soondubbed “The Sleeping Beauty”. Its success was amazing and it became objectof a macabre pilgrimage, where faith and tourism, as well as morbidity and af-fection, were indistinguishable. The same nickname given to this body, ofwhich we have now only the head, is extremely significant. The reference tothe world of fairy tales attenuates the deep meaning of this macabre voyeurismand somehow makes it more acceptable: looking at the embalmed head of thelittle girl becomes like listening to a fairy tale. On the other hand, the referenceto the fairy tales, which often have the same structure as the initiatory tales,where the heroes face adventures taking them temporarily in another world, ac-tivates the initiatory mechanism of nekuia. The body of the Sleeping Beauty,uniting sleep and death, takes us into the “other” world, from which, however,at the end of the visit, we can awaken.

The Silicon SaintIn Italy, the main centre of the Roman Catholic culture, the cult of the saints

and the relics is very important and has a long-standing history24. It is interestingto see the change that this cult has recently undergone. Even faith has been in-corporated into some typical processes of contemporary post-modern society:the construction of forms of “relative” authenticity and hybrid identities, theresearch of media coverage with its effects, and the transformation of many ex-


Morbid gaze between faith and tourism. The Capuchin Crypt in Palermo


periences into tourist ac-tivities.

An incisive exampleof this process is the cultof Padre Pio (FatherPius), a Capuchin friarwho lived in SouthernItaly in the last centuryand was beatified in1999 and canonized in2002. Some years later,in 2008, on the occasionof the public exposition of his body (an event that had a world-wide TV cov-erage), the organizers decided to show the face of Padre Pio or, rather, some-thing similar to it. Really, what could be seen was its mask: precisely, accordingto the official records, a “thin flesh-coloured silicone mask”.

Of course this choice aroused many ironies as well as lively disputes. AnIrish blogger, for example, entitled his comment “Padre Pio, the Silicon Saint”and came to write that his mask was only a “rubber Halloween mask”25. Crit-icisms came even from some declared faithful of Padre Pio. In his blog an Ital-ian believer wrote: “Of the holy friar’s body we will not see even a shred offlesh (...). We want to see it at all costs. But who decides (for us) have statedthat we must see nothing”26. The protest in this case was not so much againstthe mask as against the concealment of the body.

The “invisible” mask located on the face of Padre Pio gave authenticity tothe experience: it prevented us from seeing the “real” face, creating a barrierwith reality, but it putted us in touch with the world of death, allowing us tosee it. The fact that the official site carefully specifies that the mask was “thin”reveals a latent embarrassment for this mix of nature and nurture (in this case,of technology) and between the sacred and the profane27.

At the same time it also suggests the symbolic function of “passage” of themask: regardless of its material, it allows us to look “beyond”. However, evenhere we face a hybrid reality: paradoxically, the artificial mask gives identityand authenticity to a real body. As we grasp from the newspapers that have cov-ered the event, the believers were stricken by the “rosy” colour and by the “vi-tal” look of the face, interpreted as evidence of holiness, although due only tothe mask.


The silicon Saint. The mask of Padre Pio


A particular reflection deserves the use of silicone. Beyond its instrumen-tal use due to its well-known qualities, we cannot forget its symbolic value inthe present society. The industry of beauty, connected with the new culture ofwellness, has largely built its fortunes on this substance.

One of the most interesting aspects of this operation is the company en-trusted with the mask: Madame Tussauds Museum. This brings us back to theheart of the society of reproduction and virtual reality already treated by Ben-jamin and Baudrillard28.

The Church, to affirm the “authenticity” of the body exposed, turned to awax museum, using the tools of the culture of leisure and entertainment. Withthe intention of stressing the uniqueness of the Saint’s body, it actually createdthe conditions for its multiplication. In fact, simulacra of Padre Pio are nowhoused in many wax museums, where they appear to be more authentic or, atleast, less fake, since each copy carries the same mask as the original. More-over, we must recall that Padre Pio is not only an object of popular worship;he is also a hero of contemporary media culture and, thanks to quite consid-erable financial investments, the village where he lived, San Giovanni Rotondo,has been transformed into a powerful attraction for tourism, with all its inducedactivities.

A different modelIn our society the widespread consumption of films and television pro-

grammes has led us to metabolize the view of death, blood and violence. Welive in a state of anaesthetized horror in which the macabre is “news”, “show”and even marketing tool. Horror only lasts for the short time allowed by thetelevision news.

We have learned to live together with the most shocking images thanks toa new aesthetic of death that exorcises them.

Let us think at the bodies falling or diving from the Twin Towers on 9/11,at charred bodies of the American soldiers burned on the Baghdad bridge, atthe bodies of the victims of the tsunami, floating on the sea, decomposed andinflated by water and putrefaction: all images published full-page in the news-papers and transmitted and re-transmitted by television29.

But there is another way of representing the horror, which is perhaps evenmore effective: absence. In a society based on the images and an aesthetic cultof the body, absence of images and lack of bodies create anxiety and fear.

This is the case of the concentration camps turned into museums; this is the



case of the Holocaustmuseums, where thepresence of absence isoverwhelming and dis-quieting and the bodiesof the victims are pres-ent in their absence. Ob-jects, photographs,spaces become signsand metaphor of themissing bodies. Oncemore, we find a sort ofnekuia: an initiatoryjourney into the worldof death.

A quite peculiar case is the 921 Earthquake Museum of Taiwan. In 1999 aterrible earthquake devastated the island, destroying roads, buildings andschools. The government decided to transform one of the schools destroyed intoa museum. Memory, mourning, prevention, education and tourism are hereclosely intertwined, in an interesting experiment of serious edutainment.

In that school there were no casualties. But the pillars shattered and theschool desks piled recall the tragedy and give material consistency to the ab-sent bodies of the victims of any past and future earthquake.

This museum is a good example of an educational relationship with deathand disasters that responds quite well to the emotional needs of contemporarysociety. It satisfies the morbid impulses that lurk in each of us. But, at the sametime, it teaches us − without the usual sensationalism and cynicism of the massmedia − to accept death and to respect the human body.

ReferencesBaudrillard J., Simulacres et Simulation, Galilée, Paris 1981.Bauman Z., Liquid Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge 2000.Belzoni G.B., Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries Within the

Pyramids, Temples, Tombs and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia and of aJourney to the Coast of the Red Sea, in search of the ancient Berenice; andanother to the Oasis of Jupiter Ammon, John Murray, London 1820.


A school collapsed. Site of the 919 Earthquake Museum ofTaiwan


Benjamin W., Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzier-barkeit, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt a.M. 1955.

Bock, Padre Pio, the Silicon Saint, http://bocktherobber.com/2008/04/padre-pio-the-silicon-saint (26/04/2008).

Brown M.F. and Bruchac M.M., Nagpra from the Middle Distance: Legal Puz-zles and Unintended Consequences, in J.H. Merryman (ed.), Imperialism,Art and Restitution, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2006,pp. 193-217.

Burns L., Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds: Selling beautiful education, in“The American Journal of Bioethics”, 7, 4, 2007, pp. 12-23.

Cantarella E., Sopporta Cuore. La scelta di Ulisse, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2013.Capecelatro G., Un sole nel labirinto. Storia e leggenda di Raimondo di San-

gro, Principe di Sansevero, Il Saggiatore, Milano 2000.Chamberlain A.T. and Parker Pearson M., Earthly Remains. The History and

Science of Preserved Human Bodies, The British Museum Press, London2001.

Dwyer E., Science or Morbid Curiosity? The Casts of Giuseppe Fiorelli andthe Last Days of Romantic Pompeii, in V.C. Gardner Coates and J.L. Seydl(eds), Antiquity Recovered. The Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum, TheJ. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2007, pp. 171-188.

Fleckinger A., Ötzi, l’Uomo venuto dal ghiaccio, Folio, Bolzano - Wien 2007.Frayling C., The Face of Tutankhamun, Faber, London 1992.Gardner Coates V.C., Lapatin K., Seydl J.L. (eds), The Last Days of Pompeii.

Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection, Getty Publications, Los Angeles2012.

Hales S. and Paul J. (eds), Pompeii in the Public Imagination. From its Re-discovery to Today, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2011.

Heaney S., The man and the bog, in B. Coles, J. Coles and M. Schou Jorgensen(eds), Bog Bodies, Sacred Sites and Wetland Archaeology, Warp, Exeter1999, pp. 3-6.

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James T.G.H., Howard Carter: the Path to Tutankhamun, Kegan Paul, NewYork 1992.

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Lennon J. and Foley M., Dark Tourism: The Attraction of Death and Disas-ter, Continuum, London 2000.

Liveley K., Delusion and Dream in Théophile Gautier’s Arria Marcella; Sou-venir de Pompéi, in S. Hales and J. Paul, Pompeii in the Public Imagina-tion, q.v., pp. 105-117.

Maiuri A., Pompei. I nuovi scavi e la villa dei misteri, Libreria dello Stato,Roma 1931.

Manseau P., Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead, St. Mar-tin’s Press, New York 2010.

Marchant J., The Shadow King: The Bizarre Afterlife of King Tut’s Mummy,Da Capo Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2013.

Melotti M., I riti di passaggio, in Antichità classica, Garzanti, Milano 2000,pp. 719-720.

Melotti M., Crossing Worlds: Space, Myths and Passage Rites in Ancient GreekCulture, in K. Mustakallio et al. (eds), Hoping for Continuity. Childhood,Education and Death in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Acta Instituti Ro-mani Finlandiae 33, Roma, 2005, pp. 203-241.

Melotti M., Il fascino indiscreto delle catastrofi. Impatto mitico e mediaticodello tsunami sull’immaginario collettivo, in “La Critica Sociologica”,158, 2006, pp. 88-107.

Melotti M., Nascita di un mito. Il turismo a Pompei tra amore e morte, in L.Jacobelli (ed.), Pompei, la costruzione di un mito. Arte, letteratura e aned-dotica nell’immagine turistica di Pompei, Bardi, Roma 2008, pp. 95-116.

Melotti M., Fantasie ibride. Il corpo e la maschera nella rete globale, in P.Sisto, P. Totaro (eds), Il Carnevale e il Mediterraneo, Progedit, Bari 2010,pp. 57-88.

Melotti M., The Plastic Venuses. Archaeological Tourism and Post-Modern So-ciety, Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle 2011.

Nicoletti G., L’Ikea del post-mortem, “La Stampa”, 30/08/2011.Ogden D., Greek and Roman Necromancy, Princeton University Press, Prince-

ton - Oxford 2001.Pagano M., I calchi in archeologia: Ercolano e Pompei, in A. D’Ambrosio,

P.G. Guzzo, M. Mastroroberto (eds), Storie di un’eruzione. Pompei, Er-colano, Oplontis, Electa, Milano 2003, pp. 120-125.

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Directions and Concluding Comments, in R. Sharpley and P.R. Stone, TheDarker Side of Travel, q.v., 2009, pp. 247-251.

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Simone, Padre Pio e la maschera di cera, inhttp://popimmersion.blogspot.com/2008/04/padre-pio-e-la-mashera-di-cera.html, April 2008.

Walter T., Body Worlds: Clinical detachment or anatomical awe?, in “Soci-ology of Health and Illness”, 26, 4, 2004, pp. 464-488.

Zatterin M., Il gigante del Nilo. Storia e avventure del Grande Belzoni, IlMulino, Bologna 2008.

MarxianoMelotti studies the continuity and discontinuity between the an-cient and the modern world, with special reference to the re-discovery and val-orisation of the past in the contemporary societies and, particularly, in the me-dia. The relationships between tourism, world heritage and cultural identity areamong his main interests. He works on the relationships between religious rites,cultural memory and tourism.

He is professor of Sociology and History of Educational Processes at “Nic-colò Cusano” University of Human Sciences (Rome) and professor of Tourismand Heritage in the Master of Bicocca University in Magodhoo (Maldives). Hewas Visiting professor at the Universities of Tampere (Finland), Gandia(Spain) and Viseu (Portugal) and professor in the International Master in Eco-nomics and Administration of Cultural Heritage at the University of Catania.

He is also the Secretary General of the Foundation for the Italian Instituteof Human Sciences (SUM), which organizes cultural events, seminars and con-ferences connected with cultural heritage and promotes the Observatory on theItalian Culture.

Among his published works, there are the books The Plastic Venuses. Ar-chaeological Tourism and Post-Modern Society (Cambridge Scholars, New-castle 2011), Turismo archeologico (Bruno Mondadori, Milano 2008), Mediter-raneo tra miti e turismo (Cuem, Milano 2007).

On these themes he gave lectures in Italy and other countries (the UnitedStates, Australia, Brazil, China, Saudi Arabia, Germany, Spain, Finland, Por-tugal, Greece and Monaco).

* This essay elaborates the text of a lecture given in Helsinki in 2013 at Heureka, the



Finnish Science Centre, on the occasion of the exhibition “Gunther von Hagens’Body Worlds”. I thank Mikko Millikoski, Research Director of Eureka.

Notes1 S. Heaney, The man and the bog, in B. Coles, J. Coles and M. Schou Jorgensen (eds),Bog Bodies, Sacred Sites and Wetland Archaeology, Warp, Exeter 1999, pp. 3-6.

2 W. Kritz, Foreword to G. von Hagens and A. Whalley (eds), Gunther von Hagens’Body Worlds. The Original Exhibition of Real Human Bodies, Arts and Sciences,Heidelberg 2009. You can see also the site www.bodyworlds.com.

3 On this exhibition see T. Walter, Body Worlds: Clinical detachment or anatomicalawe?, in “Sociology of Health and Illness”, 26, 4, 2004, pp. 464-488; L. Burns, Gun-ther von Hagens’ Body Worlds: Selling beautiful education, in “The AmericanJournal of Bioethics”, 7, 4, 2007, pp. 12-23; R. Sharpley and P. Stone, Life, Deathand Dark Tourism: Future Research Directions and Concluding Comments, in R.Sharpley and P.R. Stone, The Darker Side of Travel. The Theory and Practice ofDark Tourism, Channel View, Bristol 2009, pp. 247-248.

4 On “dark tourism” see J. Lennon and M. Foley, Dark Tourism: The Attraction ofDeath and Disaster, Continuum, London 2000; R. Sharpley and P.R. Stone, TheDarker Side of Travel. The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism, Channel View,Bristol 2009.

5 On the concept of “liquid society” see Z. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Polity Press,Cambridge 2000.

6 G. Nicoletti, L’Ikea del post-mortem, “La Stampa”, 30/08/2011.7 Homer, Odyssey, book 11. On the ritual meaning of katabasis in ancient world see

D. Ogden, Greek and Roman Necromancy, Princeton University Press, Princeton andOxford 2001.

8 On the meaning of the contact with the otherness in Odyssey see D.L. Page, Folk-tales in Homer’s Odyssey, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1973, andE. Cantarella, Sopporta Cuore. La scelta di Ulisse, Feltrinelli, Milano 2013. On pas-sage rites in the ancient world see M. Melotti, Crossing Worlds: Space, Myths andPassage Rites in Ancient Greek Culture, in K. Mustakallio et al. (eds), Hoping forContinuity. Childhood, Education and Death in Antiquity and the Middle Ages, ActaInstituti Romani Finlandiae 33, Roma 2005, pp. 203-241; M. Melotti, I riti di pas-saggio, in Antichità classica, Garzanti, Milano 2000, pp. 719-720.

9 G. B. Belzoni, Narrative of the Operations and Recent Discoveries Within the Pyr-amids, Temples, Tombs and Excavations in Egypt and Nubia and of a Journey to the



Coast of the Red Sea, in search of the ancient Berenice; and another to the Oasisof Jupiter Ammon, John Murray, London 1820; M. Zatterin, Il gigante del Nilo. Sto-ria e avventure del Grande Belzoni, Il Mulino, Bologna 2008.

10 On the debate and redefinition of values connected to “native” artefacts see M.F.Brown and M.M. Bruchac, Nagpra from the Middle Distance: Legal Puzzles and Un-intended Consequences, in J.H. Merryman (ed.), Imperialism, Art and Restitution,Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2006, pp. 193-217; and the chapterThe Ethics of Display and Ownership in A.T. Chamberlain, M. Parker Pearson,Earthly Remains. The History and Science of Preserved Human Bodies, The BritishMuseum Press, London 2001, pp. 180-188.

11 M. Melotti, The Plastic Venuses. Archaeological Tourism and Post-Modern Soci-ety, Cambridge Scholars, Newcastle 2011.

12 On the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamun and on some aspects of the relatedmyth-making process see: T.G.H. James, Howard Carter: the Path to Tutankhamun,Kegan Paul, New York 1992; C. Frayling, The Face of Tutankhamun, Faber, Lon-don 1992; J. Marchant, The Shadow King: The Bizarre Afterlife of King Tut’sMummy, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2013.

13 On the intriguing figure of Sansevero see G. Capecelatro, Un sole nel labirinto. Sto-ria e leggenda di Raimondo di Sangro, Principe di Sansevero, Il Saggiatore, Milano2000.

14 On the myth-making of Pompeii and the role of death in this process see: M.Melotti, Nascita di un mito. Il turismo a Pompei tra amore e morte, in L. Jacobelli(ed.), Pompei, la costruzione di un mito. Arte, letteratura e aneddotica nell’immagineturistica di Pompei, Bardi, Roma 2008, pp. 95-116; S. Hales and J. Paul (eds), Pom-peii in the Public Imagination. From its Rediscovery to Today, Oxford UniversityPress, Oxford 2011; V.C. Gardner Coates, K. Lapatin, J.L. Seydl (eds), The Last Daysof Pompeii. Decadence, Apocalypse, Resurrection, Getty Publications, Los Ange-les 2012.

15 L. Jacobelli, introduction to Th. Gautier, Arria Marcella. Ricordo di Pompei, Flav-ius, Pompei 2007. See also K. Liveley, Delusion and Dream in Théophile Gautier’sArria Marcella; Souvenir de Pompéi, in S. Hales and J. Paul, Pompeii in the Pub-lic Imagination, q.v., pp. 105-117.

16 On the casts in Pompeii: M. Pagano, I calchi in archeologia: Ercolano e Pompei,in A. D’Ambrosio, P.G. Guzzo, M. Mastroroberto (eds), Storie di un’eruzione. Pom-pei, Ercolano, Oplontis, Electa, Milano 2003, pp. 120-125; E. Dwyer, Science orMorbid Curiosity? The Casts of Giuseppe Fiorelli and the Last Days of RomanticPompeii, in V.C. Gardner Coates and J.L. Seydl (eds), Antiquity Recovered. The



Legacy of Pompeii and Herculaneum, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles,2007, pp. 171-188.

17 A.T. Chamberlain, M. Parker Pearson, Earthly Remains. q.v., pp. 150-153.18 A. Maiuri, Pompei. I nuovi scavi e la villa dei misteri, Libreria dello Stato, Roma

1931.19 E. Dwyer, Science or Morbid Curiosity?, q.v., p. 183.20 M. Melotti, Fantasie ibride. Il corpo e la maschera nella rete globale, in P. Sisto,

P. Totaro (eds), Il Carnevale e il Mediterraneo, Progedit, Bari 2010, pp. 57-88.21 These are the words of the President of the Ente Musei Provinciali dell’Alto Adige

in the introduction Il fascino dell’Uomo venuto dal ghiaccio in the guidebook ed-ited by the Bolzano Museum: A. Fleckinger, Ötzi, l’Uomo venuto dal ghiaccio, Fo-lio, Bolzano - Wien 2007, p.7.

22 Ibidem, p. 39.23 Ibidem, p. 106.24 On cults of relics and bodies, see P. Manseau, Rag and Bone: A Journey Among theWorld’s Holy Dead, St. Martin’s Press, New York 2010.

25 Bock, Padre Pio, the Silicon Saint, http://bocktherobber.com/2008/04/padre-pio-the-silicon-saint (26/04/2008).

26 Simone, Padre Pio e la maschera di cera, inhttp://popimmersion.blogspot.com/2008/04/padre-pio-e-la-mashera-di-cera.html,aprile 2008.

27 M. Melotti, Fantasie ibride, q.v.28 W. Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,

Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1955; J. Baudrillard, Simulacres et Simulation, Galilée, Paris1981.

29 On the voyeuristic character of the media coverage of this tragedy see M. Melotti,Il fascino indiscreto delle catastrofi. Impatto mitico e mediatico dello tsunami sul-l’immaginario collettivo, in “La Critica Sociologica”, 158, 2006, pp. 88-107.



Seductive Bodies: the Glamour of Death between Myth and Tourism

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