Your article (Bone store sees the light, 2 April) reminded me of my first, and last, visit to the ossuary of Santa Maria della Concezione dei Cappuccini in Rome, where the bones of thousands of friars “decorate” the walls in a macabre work of art. Some of the skeletons are intact and draped with Franciscan habits, but for the most part individual bones are used to create elaborate ornamental designs, including lampshades. A plaque reading “What you are now we once were; what we are now, you shall be” seems a little superfluous.
Paul Murphy
Navan, Co Meath, Ireland
• Shameful AA practices have been going on for years (Report, 7 April). In the 80s, my mother-in-law was approached by an AA salesman in Maidstone who persuaded her to join. She had never learned to drive, and may well have been the only ever pedestrian member of the AA.
Jan Jeffries
Brewood, Staffordshire
• Perhaps Xiaolu Guo (The books that made me, Review, 7 April), having claimed that “almost all” of Dickens’ novels are “sentimental, clumsy and lack poetry”, would further enlighten us by identifying the exceptions?
Richard Williams
East Twickenham, London
• Gill Gibson (Letters, 5 April) asks who is interested in G2’s Pet Corner. Our six-year-old son loves it and tests us on it (and he laments its absence at the weekend). It gets him looking through the paper, which is great.
Charlotte Rigby
Surbiton, Kingston upon Thames
• On holiday in Italy last year, I sent off 27 postcards. None of them arrived (‘Underpaid’ postman kept 400kg of mail, 7 April).
Joanna Moody
Pateley Bridge, North Yorkshire
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