Sleeping
Beauty
She's one of the world's
best-preserved bodies: Rosalia Lombardo, a two-year-old Sicilian girl who died
of pneumonia in 1920. "Sleeping Beauty," as she's known, appears to
be merely dozing beneath the glass front of her coffin in the Capuchin Catacombs
of Palermo, Italy.
Now an Italian biological
anthropologist, Dario Piombino-Mascali of the Institute for Mummies and the
Iceman in Bolzano, has discovered the secret formula that preserved Rosalia's
body so well. (Piombino-Mascali is funded by the National
Geographic Society's Expeditions Council. National Geographic News
is owned by the National Geographic Society.)
Piombino-Mascali tracked
down living relatives of Alfredo Salafia, a Sicilian taxidermist and embalmer
who died in 1933. A search of Salafia's papers revealed a handwritten memoir in
which he recorded the chemicals he injected into Rosalia's body: formalin, zinc
salts, alcohol, salicylic acid, and glycerin.
Formalin, now widely used
by embalmers, is a mixture of formaldehyde and water that kills bacteria.
Salafia was one of the first to use this for embalming bodies. Alcohol, along
with the arid conditions in the catacombs, would have dried Rosalia's body and
allowed it to mummify. Glycerin would have kept her body from drying out too
much, and salicylic acid would have prevented the growth of fungi.
But it was the zinc
salts, according to Melissa Johnson Williams, executive director of the
American Society of Embalmers, that were most responsible for Rosalia's amazing
state of preservation. Zinc, which is no longer used by embalmers in the United
States, petrified Rosalia's body.
"[Zinc] gave her
rigidity," Williams said. "You could take her out of the casket prop
her up, and she would stand by herself."
Piombino-Mascali calls
the self-taught Salafia an artist: "He elevated embalming to its highest
level."
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