https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hell-banquets
“Before Haunted Houses, There Were Hell Banquets”
The macabre feasts have their roots in ancient Rome.
IN MARCH 1519, GUESTS ARRIVED at Lorenzo di Filippo Strozzi’s home in Rome to attend the banker’s lavish Carnival feast. With the pious Lenten season coming up, this would be a day for excess. The attendees expected decadent spreads of wine, meat, and sweets, perhaps even a gorgeous sugar sculpture or two.
Instead, they were met with darkness. A single candle illuminated the entrance of Strozzi’s home. Confused, the guests moved up the stairs, through a black door, and found themselves in another dim room. The few flickering candles revealed skulls, skeletons, and a black table. Strozzi had set the table for a feast, but instead of roasts and pastry, the table held a giant skull surrounded by bones.
The frightened guests looked to their host for an explanation. “Gentlemen, eat,” Strozzi instructed instead. But, according to one account, “no one wanted to eat, because it was such a terrifying scene.” Just when his guests couldn’t take any more (at least two cardinals vomited that day), Strozzi orchestrated the grand finale, cracking open the skull and bones to reveal they were fake, and filled with roast pheasant and sausages.
The grotesque scene was met with mixed reviews. “It is said that such a wonderful supper had never been given in Rome and that it surely cost a great deal of money,” wrote one observer. “But, everyone was terrified tremendously.”
While Strozzi’s house of horrors might seem shocking, what’s even more surprising is that it was not the only banquet of its kind. The late historian Phyllis Pray Bober categorized these types of macabre feasts as “black or hell banquets,” where the settings were “designed to evoke funeral services at the least or afflictions of Hell itself at worst.” After tracing the history of such banquets, Bober identified examples stretching from ancient Rome all the way to 19th-century Paris. According to Bober, this family tree came from “the grandfather of them all,” a feast so horrifying that the guests believed they had attended only to be murdered.
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