Home for the dead gets a facelift

Bastaroli restoring the catacombs in Paris and (below) a wall made of bones in the catacombs. For centuries, the bones of some six million people were buried in the catacombs beneath the city. Curators are trying to preserve and modernise the tunnels while maintaining the spooky ambience. — Dmitry Kostyukov/The New York Times

FOR more than two centuries, tourists have descended beneath the streets of Paris to visit the catacombs, a dank and macabre labyrinth filled with the remains of up to six million Parisians.

From floor to ceiling, they are lined with bones, femur by femur, skull by skull, that draw 600,000 visitors a year to the dimly lit tunnels.