Some called it a miracle while others said it was a supernatural phenomenon after seeing the mummified remains of child apparently moving her eyes.
Among visitors, there was some agreement that Rosalia, a small mummy kept in catacombs of a Capuchin religious order in the Sicilian city of Palermo, "opens and closes her eyes".
The Capuchins, who declined comment on the reports for several days, finally issued an explanation Thursday: the apparent eye movement was merely a trick of the light caused after the mummy was moved slightly. "It is an optical illusion produced by the light that filters through the side windows, which during the day is subject to change," says Dario Piombino-Mascali, curator of the catacombs site where more than 3,000 mummies rest.
After the mummy was shifted to a horizontal position, it became possible to see that her eyelids were not completely closed, leading to an optical illusion of eye movement, said Piombino-Mascali.
Rosalia, who is one of the most studied and visited of the mummies because of her remarkable state of preservation, was an Italian child who died of pneumonia in December 1920. Her grieving father asked a Palermo embalmer to preserve the child and her body become one of the last to be admitted to the Capuchin catacombs.
After it was discovered in 2009 that her corpse was beginning to decompose, it was moved to a drier spot and hermetically sealed in a glass coffin.
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