The Catacombs are about 65 feet deep, roughly the height of a five-story building if you turned it upside down. It takes 131 steps to get to the bottom of the Catacombs, so wear your walking shoes.
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In the Paris Catacombs, there are 131 steps to go down and 112 steps to climb up.
The unique and fragile ossuary presented at the Paris Catacombs must not be touched. Group leaders must make their groups aware of the essential rules for preserving the works and be considerate towards other visitors. It is fordbidden to smoke, eat or drink inside the Paris Catacombs.
However, the strong smell of the Paris catacombs is apparently what all the initial signs were warning sensitive visitors about. At best, it could be likened to the dusty, incense-infused scent of old stone churches, but with an underlying malaise that can only be attributed to the contents of multiple cemeteries.
Some areas of the tunnels even became shrines for martyrs buried there. But after Christianity was legalized in 313 AD, funerals moved above ground, and by the 5th Century, the use of catacombs as grave sites dwindled, though they were still revered as sacred sites where pilgrims would come to worship.
Despite the ritual with which they were transferred, the bones had simply been dumped into the tunnels in large heaps. Slowly but surely the quarrymen lined the walls with tibias and femurs punctuated with skulls which form the basis of most of the decorations that tourists see today.
Known as the first ever in the world, the Catacombs of San Sebastiano are a hypogeum cemetery in Rome, rising along Via Appia Antica in the Ardeatino Quarter. They are one of the few Christian burial locations that have always been accessible.
It took the city 12 years to move all the bones—from bodies numbering between 6 and 7 million—into the catacombs. Some of the oldest date back as far as the Merovingian era, more than 1,200 years ago. Beginning during the French Revolution, the dead were buried directly in the catacomb's ossuaries .
Over the course of 15 months, millions of bodies were relocated to the empty mines, which had been causing infrastructure problems. What better way to put them to use than to store remains in them? Now, there are over seven million bodily remains in the catacombs.
On exiting the Catacombs you will be searched to make sure you have brought no bones with you. There are no toilets or facilities during the tour and note you may have been queueing for some time before entry. There are guided tours you can purchase.
Hygiene. Both catacombs were dug largely for hygiene reasons. Rotting bodies in the middle of a city is not ideal, especially when they start piling up as they did in Paris. Both catacombs were created to avoid disease, but in Rome, they thought ahead.
It's currently estimated that the catacombs consist of 320 kilometers of tunnels, but specialists have only mapped a portion of the ossuaries. The city sometimes relies on the knowledge of local cataphiles, urban explorers who tour the mines illegally.
It may have been one of the largest and most prosperous cities in the Western World but its own rapid growth was causing the city's cemeteries to literally overflow with the bodies of the dead.