Santa Maria dell' Orazione e Morte

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Church of Santa Maria dell' Orazione e Morte, Rome
Santa Maria dell' Orazione 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). 
Skull, church of Santa Maria dell' Orazione e Morte, Rome
Detail of the Upper Facade
​The facade sports several references to death in the form of skeleton heads and winged hour-glasses. The two lower oval windows have wrought-iron screens, shaped so as to depict hour-glasses and the Instruments of the Passion. The inscription reads: IND · PLEN · QVOT · PERPETVA · PRO · VIVIS · ET · DEFVNCTIS. In other words, a visit to the church can obtain a plenary indulgence for the living and the dead on any day of the year in perpetuity.
A detail of the facade, church of Santa Maria dell' Orazione e Morte, Rome
Detail of the Lower Facade
The church was built for the Compagnia della Morte, a charitable confraternity of laypeople, which was set up in 1538. Its mission was to provide a proper burial for bodies found abandoned in the countryside (campagna) or in the river. A much-photographed marble slab, on the facade of the church, depicts a winged skeleton seated on a coffin holding a winged hour-glass over a dead body. The inscription reads: ELEMOSINA PER I POVERI MORTI CHE SI PIGLIANO IN CAMPAGNA MDCXCIV (Alms for the poor dead who are taken in the countryside 1694).
Interior, church of Santa Maria dell' Orazione e Morte, Rome
Interior
There was a cemetery between the church and the river, with several ossuary vaults. The records of the confraternity indicate that during the course of its activity it buried in the region of 8,600 bodies. The building of the embankments commenced at the end of the 19th century and this entailed the destruction of the cemetery and the vaults, except for one under the church.
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