Centro di documentazione Baronio Vincenzi – Museo delle Mummie di Borgo Cerreto

Museum in the former church of Santi Gesù e Maria with the twenty-three mummies of village residents, dating from the 18th and 19th centuries.

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About the museum

The Centro di documentazione “Baronio Vincenzi” is housed in the former church of Santi Gesù e Maria in Borgo Cerreto, a hamlet of Cerreto di Spoleto in the Valnerina. It is named after the physician and surgeon who worked in the area between the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and it is the seat of the municipality's museo diffuso (dispersed museum), which holds archaeological, historical, anthropological and environmental evidence from the area.

The building has three levels: a multi-purpose hall at street level, two exhibition rooms in the crypts and, at the lowest level, a permanent laboratory for the study of the mummies. In the crypts the mummified bodies of twenty-three residents of the village were found: nine men, six women, one adolescent, five children and two newborns, some still in their original wooden coffins. The state of preservation varies greatly: eight bodies are well mummified, seven partly so, and eight have been reduced to skeletons.

The burials date from the first half of the 18th century to the first half of the 19th century. The study of the bodies, clothing and grave goods has provided information on daily life, diet, diseases and surgical practices in a small rural community. Three skulls document the surgical activity of Baronio Vincenzi, including a case of trepanation with long survival.

Highlights

Twenty-three mummies of village residents (18th–19th century)
Original wooden coffins
Skulls with traces of surgical trepanation
Laboratory for studying the mummies
Guided routes through the villages of the Valnerina