Tucked away in Palermo, Italy's Capuchin Catacombs lies the final resting place of the world's most beautiful mummy known as the ‘Girl in the Glass Coffin’ or ‘Sleeping Beauty’, Rosalía Lombardo is widely considered one of the best preserved mummies in the world. And that you might even think she's alive... especially when she blinks at you. In death she's become something larger than life. Thousands of visitors each year flock to the Sicilian Catacombs just to catch a glimpse of her tiny body.

     Who exactly was Rosalia? In the nearly 100 years since her death in 1920, Rosalia has become interwoven with Sicilian lore. They tell of a young child, born frail and weak, who endured more pain and sickness throughout her short life than most do in their lifetimes. Her premature death at age two left her father grief stricken. Unable to lose his daughter the father sought the help of embalmer Alfredo Salafia, to preserve Rosalia for eternity. The result was nothing short of miraculous. Through Salafia's embalming process, Rosalia was perfectly preserved. Fitting to her new state of immortality, she was placed inside a glass coffin and interred inside the Capuchin Catacombs of Sicily.

     Rosalia Lombardo was only two years old when she died from pneumonia in 1920.There are no known photographs of Rosalia alive nor any official documents confirming definitively who her parents were.

     Little is known about Rosalia's short life, but after her death she was embalmed by Alfredo Salafia, a mortician so skilled that his work  not only looks better than much of the embalming performed

today, but it wasn't until recently that his actual technique was rediscovered and understood. MRIs taken just five years ago show that each of Rosalia's tiny organs are still intact, a sign that points all the way back to Egyptian methods of mummification.

     Dr. Salafia performed the procedure that would preserve Rosalia. For about a century, the exact formula remained a mystery, lost to the grave with Salafia. In 2009, a biological anthropologist named Dario Piombino-Mascali tracked down the eternal formula through Salafia’s living decedents. He found a handwritten manuscript in which Salafia listed the ingredients used to mummify Rosalia. The formula read: 'one part glycerin, one part formalin saturated with both zinc sulfate and chloride, and one part of an alcohol solution saturated with salicylic acid'.”According this miraculous formula, the chemicals included formalin, zinc salt, alcohol, salicylic acid and glycerin. The combination of alcohol and the climate conditions within the catacombs would have dried Rosalia’s body. Glycerin would have allowed the body to mummify and salicylic acid prevented the growth of mold. The magic ingredient was zinc which gave the body rigidity, essentially turning it into wax. Nearly 100 years after her death, Rosalia has changed little. 

     Still sealed inside her tiny glass coffin, Rosalia sleeps, her little head pokes above a fading silk blanket. Tuffs of blonde hair still flow down her cheeks, a silk bow still tied firmly around her head. The only sign time has passed is an oxidizing amulet of the Virgin Mary which rests atop Rosalia's blanket. It's so faded, it's almost unrecognizable. This is the Rosalia

Lombardo, the famous child mummy.  Salafia just had to mix up this concoction and inject it into little Rosalia’s body via a single, tiny hole. 

     The mixture then got to work, with the formalin killing all the bacteria, the glycerin ensuring that her body didn’t desiccate, and the salicylic acid wiping out any fungi in the flesh. The role of the zinc salts was to petrify Rosalia’s body.

     While most of the mummies buried in the catacombs were treated by the monks and basically desiccated by the dry environment, Rosalia was mummified artificially. She was one of the last corpses to be admitted to the Capuchin catacombs of Palermo, Sicily where about 8,000 mummies are being kept. She soon became one of the most well-known. Her preservation is such that it appears as if she were only sleeping. Today, thousands of visitors visit the Sicilian Catacombs to take a look and admire this little girl that never had the chance to enjoy life.

     Because of the near perfect nature of Rosalia's body, some skeptics claimed that the real body was replaced with a realistic wax replica. Such a theory became one of the topics of a History Channel documentary in the 2000s. In it, x-ray equipment was brought to the catacombs and Rosalia's coffin was x-rayed for the first time in its existence. They discovered not only a skeletal structure but that her organs were still intact. Her brain was perfectly visible only having shrunk 50% due to the mummification process.     In 2009, a National Geographic documentary had an MRI performed on the body, producing the first 3D images of Rosalia both inside and out. The MRI confirmed all of her organs were perfectly intact. It also showed her arms at her sides. Nobody has ever looked underneath the blanket that covers Rosalia's body since she was sealed inside her coffin 90 years ago.      Now, almost an entire century after her death, visitors say that Rosalia actually blinks her eyes inside her glass coffin. The captured time-

lapse photos appear to show her eyelids eerily opening and closing, her blue eyes undamaged and glistening in the catacomb lights.  

     Several time-lapse photos exist that appear to substantiate this, showing them opening at least 1/8 of an inch, revealing her intact blue eyes underneath. The most likely cause of this rather creepy phenomenon is changes in room temperature or simply an optical illusion. Yet it's fueled many cult believes of Rosalia's spirit returning to the body and is Rosalia's most infamous myth.

     Then finally, in 2009, anthropologist and curator of the Capuchin Catacombs, Dario Piombino-Mascali, debunked the myth of Sicily’s beautiful blonde-haired mummy child. “It’s an optical illusion produced by the light that filters through the side windows, which during the day is subject to change,” he told.

     Piombino-Mascali made this discovery when he noticed that the mummy’s case had been moved by workers at the museum, which caused her to shift slightly, allowing him to see her eyelids better than ever before. "They are not completely closed, and indeed they have never been," Piombino-Mascali said.

       Rosalia's perfect mummy exemplifies humans' fascination with death. As the innocence of the young toddler is forever frozen in time, the quality of her beauty captures the imagination of generation after generation. Her corpse receives more visitors than any other mummy in the Catacombs. Many artists have used Rosalia as an inspiration over the years.

      To visit the incredible corpse of Rosalia Lombardo yourself, visit the Capuchin Catacombs in Palermo, Italy, where some 8,000 bodies rest in full view of guests who often  find themselves  quite  shaken  by the experience. Be sure to bring your camera.  You never know when Sleeping Beauty might give you a wink.