Putridaria (strainer rooms) and draining practices of the bodies: anthropology of death in the modern age

In Northern Italy, there survives some particular funerary structures, described in scholarship as putridaria (strainer rooms),associated with particular burial practices from the eighteenth and nineteenth century. These structures, which are normally placed in crypts under churches, allowed to intervene in the processes of decomposition and were functional at prolonged treatment of the corpses subjecting the body to two different funeral ceremonies. The purpose of this research is to propose an interpretation about the intended use of these facilities and the universe to which ritual, ethics, and religion responded, through the examination of archival sources, material structures, religious and medical literary works of the period.