La storia degli antichi milanesi letta nelle ossa e nei documenti. Il nuovo progetto di analisi antropologica e paleopatologica dei resti ossei della Ca’ Granda

The crypt of the Beata Vergine Annunziata, which is a seventeenth-century burial monument for the patients of the “Ca’ Granda” hospital in Milano and a memorial for the patriots of the “Cinque Giornate” during the nineteenth century, has an enormous historical and scientific heritage (Carlessi & Kluzer 2011). In fact, below the church, 14 sepulchral chambers are preserved, of which nine are still full of human remains both in anatomical connection and commingled. Since 2009, the crypt, together with the church above, have been the object of a recovery project by the IRCCS Ca' Granda Foundation, for the restoration that led, in 2013, to its reopening to the public. At the same time, the University of Milan promoted an anthropological pilot study of samples of the material from the burial ground (Cattaneo, 2013). This has allowed for the recovery of remains of historical interest and for the study over 50,000 bones (out of the approximately two million present) that narrate the diseases and lives of these populations (Sguazza, 2016). In addition, it permitted to understand how the contents of the burial ground represent an important historical heritage of the city. In 2019, a new course of study began in collaboration with other academic departments, internal to the University of Milan. This led to a new inspection of the chambers with their 3D reconstructions, a new archaeological excavation and a new phase of the anthropological study. This, in addition to the anthropological and paleopathological data (with the aid of radiological instrumentation), is providing valuable data on nutrition (study of calculus) and exposure to heavy metals for treatment or occupation (toxicological study). At the same time, a new project was launched to compare the anthropological data with the documentation from the archives. In fact, in Milan, since the Sforza era (1452) a necropsy registry was implemented (called liber mortuorum) divided by parish, in which the list of the deceased of the city was recorded, including the date of death, age, occupation and cause of death (Vaglienti & Cattaneo, 2010). The fact that the hospital was built in a parish makes it possible to know the causes of death for all patients. The knowledge from the necropsy registry and hospital archives thus provide the skeletons of the crypt with a documentation which is similar to known reference collections, allowing to compare the data from the archives (frequency of various diseases, accuracy of the diagnosis, efficiency of the necropsy archives) with the anthropological data (diagnosed pathologies). Although, as commingled remains, the association between skeletons and documentation cannot be assessed with certainty. The purpose of this presentation is therefore to show the preliminary data of the new anthropological study and to provide the first results of the comparison between the records and the paleopathological data.