St Mary of Prayer and Death
Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte
Rome Italy
2016

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Maria_dell%27Orazione_e_Morte

Santa Maria dell' Orazione e Morte (St Mary of Prayer and Death) is an 18th century confraternity church, which was designed by the Florentine architect Ferdinando Fuga (1699-1782).

Death in via Giulia
The are many recognizable elements along this road.

The Church of Santa Maria dell’Orazione e Morte. Built by a confraternity that dealt with burying abandoned corpses in Rome. The façade is dotted with death imagery. Inside, through a door to the left of the main altar, a chamber decorated with human bones and skulls is an eerie reminder of the utilitarian issue of burying the dead. While it is rarely open to visitors, this church is worth stopping by.

The Via Giulia is a street of historical and architectural importance in Rome, Italy, which runs along the left bank of the Tiber from Piazza San Vincenzo Pallotti, near Ponte Sisto, to Piazza dell'Oro. It is about 1 kilometre long and connects the Regola and Ponte Rioni.

Via Giulia (one of Rome's smartest addresses) is home to a number of churches, but none is quite as arresting as Santa Maria dell' Orazione e Morte (St Mary of Prayer and Death), whose façade abounds with graphic references to death.
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The church was built for the Compagnia della Buona Morte (Company of the Good Death), a pious confraternity, set up in the 16th century to collect the bodies of people who were found dead and discarded in the countryside outside Rome. The company took it upon itself to provide the dead with a Christian burial.

At one time, the church was connected to the river Tiber by three tunnels, which were used for storing bodies prior to burial. The walls and ceilings of the one surviving tunnel are decorated with fantastic arabesques of human bones.