A little girl’s body sits inside a glass coffin in the underground tunnels beneath Palermo, Sicily. Her name is Rosalia Lombardo, and she died more than 100 years ago when she was just under two years old. But when people look at her today, they can hardly believe she has been dead for so long. Her blonde hair still looks perfect, her skin appears soft and smooth, and you can even see her blue eyes under her closed eyelids. People who visit her call her the “Sleeping Beauty of Palermo” because she really does look like she is just taking a nap.
Rosalia came into the world on December 13, 1918, but her life was cut short on December 6, 1920. She was only days away from turning two when she died from a lung infection called bronchopneumonia. Doctors think she probably got sick during the Spanish Flu outbreak that killed millions of people around the world in 1918. Her father, Mario Lombardo, could not accept losing his little girl, so he decided to do something unusual to keep her with him forever.
As per Geo TV, Mario went to a well-known embalmer named Alfredo Salafia and asked him to preserve his daughter’s body so she would never decay. Salafia did such a good job that doctors who took X-rays of Rosalia found something incredible. Her organs are still inside her body and mostly intact, and her brain has only gotten about half as small as it was when she died. For a body that old, this kind of preservation seems almost impossible to explain.
The secret recipe that kept a little girl looking alive
Nobody knew for many years how Salafia kept Rosalia looking so fresh and lifelike. When he died in 1933, he took his secret with him to the grave. Most people thought he must have used arsenic, which was a popular chemical for preserving bodies back then. But it turns out they were wrong. In 2009, a scientist named Dario Piombino-Mascali decided to solve the mystery once and for all. He contacted the family members of Salafia who were still alive and asked if he could look through any old papers or documents they had.
His search paid off when he found papers that showed exactly what Salafia had used. The special mixture had five different ingredients that each did a different job. There was formalin to kill any bacteria, glycerin to stop the body from drying out and shriveling up, salicylic acid to prevent mold from growing, zinc salts to make the body firm and solid, and alcohol to help everything work together.
Known as the "Sleeping Beauty of Palermo," the impeccably preserved body of Rosalia Lombardo is among the most remarkable mummies in the world.
— Rare Stories (@rarestorees) July 2, 2023
When Lombardo died in 1920 just a to her second birthday, her heartbroken father took her to an embalmer and asked him to make her… pic.twitter.com/6OEG5JMmPp
What made Salafia’s method different from other embalmers was that he did not cut open the body and take out the organs. Instead, he just made one small hole and injected his special liquid inside, which let everything stay in its natural place. While Rosalia’s story is one of preservation and remembrance, history has other tragic tales where young girls born into royalty were deliberately erased from existence by their own families.
These days, Rosalia stays inside a special glass box that workers filled with nitrogen gas. This gas helps protect her from oxygen, light, and dampness that could damage her body. The underground burial place where she rests holds around 8,000 dead bodies and more than 1,200 mummies, but not a single one looks as good as Rosalia does. Every year, thousands of curious people travel to Sicily just to see the little girl who looks like she might wake up at any second.
The Italian Sleeping Beauty.
— Silvercrow (@Silvercrowuk) October 25, 2025
On December 6th 1920, just two weeks before her second birthday, little Rosalia Lombardo, of Palermo, Sicily, wheezed through her final breath.
Pneumonia, brought on by the 1918-1920 Spanish flu epidemic, had claimed its latest victim.
Wracked… pic.twitter.com/uRBwqtV48M
There is one strange story that many visitors talk about when they see Rosalia. Some people swear they have watched her eyes slowly open and close while they stood there looking at her. But Piombino-Mascali says this is not really happening. “It’s an optical illusion produced by the light that filters through the side windows, which during the day is subject to change,” he explained to reporters.
https://x.com/GilbertCTweets/status/1775575812151890206 The truth is that Rosalia’s eyelids were never completely shut in the first place, so when the sunlight moves and changes during the day, it can make it look like her eyes are moving. Rosalia’s unusual preservation stands in contrast to other mysterious medical cases where over 1 million people suddenly became trapped in their own bodies in a strange historical event.
