We’ve had a rich diet so far of Baroque churches like this one, mostly decorated in that amazing flat brocade of colored marbles that is a specialty in Palermo. In my memory, a conflation has occurred between the piles of meat and fish and plastic toys that line so many of the streets and the fleshy marbling, resembling slices through a huge carcass, that stretch from floor to cornice on the inner surfaces of churches. So, perhaps in an unconscious search for antidotes to clear the spiritual digestion, today we have opted to see ruins of various kinds in the less dense outer parts of the city.

I debated at unbearable length about whether to come out at all. I feel like a ghost, and my first stop was the local pharmacy where they gave me a remedy whose name I recognize, and fear. Sometimes one can be purged of an illness by the mere thought of the brutality of the cure.

The texture of the inner core of Palermo was opened up significantly by Allied bombing in 1943, many scars of which remain. But the old outskirts are nonetheless much more spacious than the core, though almost as dingy. The square with the Capuchin catacombs seems particularly unlovely and nondescript, and it makes me think of a piece of science fiction I read in the fifties, set in a future where the city has sunk into gray squalor because the whole populace is indoors watching an enhanced version of TV.

The most striking ornaments in the square are a couple of gaping holes on the far side of it, unmarked doorways in an undecorated classical portico which someone with a ghoulish sense of humor has tacked onto the stairway leading down into the weird indoor cemetery that draws large crowds of living tourists.

There are no tickets and no reductions for this visit to the underworld. A fat, unspiritual, greasy monk just takes the money and throws it into a basket with unexpected abruptness. A guidebook I buy later dresses up the visit and, after a serious discussion of burial customs in different cultures starting in antiquity, talks about all the artworks lining the stairs going down into the catacombs. I don’t notice these important paintings. It seems a minimal space, stripped bare of all pretense that what lies ahead is anything but grim.

I had formed the wrong idea about this place, expecting the kind of ingenious novelties I’d seen at the Sedlec ossuary in Czechoslovakia, where bones are formed into recognizable objects, including huge chandeliers incorporating each of the 206 bones of the human skeleton, heraldry, and obelisks—memorials composed of exactly what they commemorated. In other words, a grotesque form of play that created illusions by presenting corpses as something else entirely.

In Palermo, however, corpses are treated as characters in a play. Perhaps Walt Disney and Madame Tussaud were inspired by places like this, but the Capuchin crypt will not remind you of their worlds, for in spite of all the talk about the great lengths the monks have gone to in order to create lifelike effects, it feels like somewhere that fell into disuse long ago.

Most of the corpses are wearing clothes, it is true, many of them are sitting up, and whole rows of them are standing. But standing is only a mistake of vision: they are hanging from hooks, so their feet don’t normally touch the ground. And the clothes—there’s a kind of allegory in them. They are so dusty and so faded that the whole picture sinks toward something like monochrome. They remind me of a painter that a friend of mine knew who got the idea of painting indoors with the blinds drawn and the lights off. The results were extremely melancholy: muted colors, indistinct forms.

At first the corpses in Palermo all look the same: stiff, emaciated, and vague in the features. Some of the attempts to keep them straight seem ludicrous. Monks come first, often swaddled in their habits like babies. Then priests; here ecclesiastical ranks are vigorously maintained. Bishops wear miters and more expensive fabrics. But clothes slip down on the shrunken frames and obscure the features, whatever might be left of them. One of the great lessons of the crypt is that clothes decay too; corpses decay first, and then the possessions they bring, becoming corpses of themselves in their turn. You would have to be an expert on eighteenth and nineteenth century costume to make much of the shredded residues. Not quite true perhaps—as in a child’s drawing, you can tell what the clothes are trying to represent and can summon up the right kind of collar or waistcoat from a Daumier sketch you vaguely remember.

The expressions remind you of Daumier too. Once they begin to turn their necks and stretch their jaws, you interpret the corpses’ strategically deployed spasms as interested looks or angry stares or cries of distress. They may be only crude imitations of character, but like a dog who can stand up or a horse who can count, these people hold your attention just because they can manage something like a smile or a pout.

The spatial layout of the whole is exceedingly monotonous. It is a large simple grid with a few loose ends where corridors carry on from a junction to make a dead-end fifty yards further on. In fact, there are no rooms, only corridors, with corpses two deep if they are standing, and three or more if lying along the walls. I turned a corner at one point and got a start: it looked just like one of the famous pictures of Auschwitz at the end of the war with listless emaciated figures lined up for the camera. The whole effect is more like a prison than a dwelling place for corpses, much enhanced by the metal cage extending the whole length along the lower tier, added for security reasons in 1979, according to the guide. So the corpses are much safer now from the depredations of visitors who might like to carry off little bits of them.

In 1979, trumpets the guide, a general restoration took place. What could it have been like before? All the mummified skin on show, all the encouraging plumpness, is fleshed out with straw, which often sticks out of necks and sleeves. The guide complains about fires, street repairs overhead, and, of course, the bombing, all of which have taken their toll on the corpses, but this seems a strange focus in a world where rottenness is really all there is.

By the time I notice that my voice sounds peculiar, blurred, and throaty, it is too late. We have all been breathing the foul air for too long already, luckily without knowing where to look to find the colatoio or colander, where the soft matter drained away from the fresh corpse through stone slats, leaving the parts of the body which the dressers would be able to work with. Like the sanatorium in The Magic Mountain, this is one of those places where every casual visitor ends up a patient at the moment when the nervous joking stops and the infection sets in. Back above ground, the more loosely strung labyrinth of the suburban streets proves confusing in its own way and banishes the morbid thoughts arising from our visit to the dead, but my voice keeps its below-ground timbre for the rest of the day.

Robert Harbison teaches at London Metropolitan University where he is head of the MA Program in Architectural History, Theory, and Interpretation. He is the author of Eccentric Spaces (Knopf, 1977), The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable (Thames & Hudson and MIT, 1991), and Reflections on Baroque (Reaktion and University of Chicago Press, 2000), among others.

The Coney Island Mermaid Parade takes place every year in Coney Island, New York in mid-to-late June. The Parade is a lively and welcoming ocean-themed event open to everyone.

The tradition of the Coney Island Mermaid Parade began in 1983, when the first event of this kind was conceptualized and organized by Dick Zigun, who is sometimes dubbed the “Mayor of Coney Island”, and who was the founder of the non-profit arts group Coney Island USA.

The Mermaid Parade is held in celebration of the beginning of the summer season, and so it traditionally takes place on the Saturday closest to the calendar start of summer, regardless of the weather. In 2008 the parade was on Saturday June 21st. In 2009 the parade was held on Saturday June 20th, commencing at 2 pm. In 2010 the parade was held on Saturday June 19th, commencing at 2 pm.

The parade pays homage to the Coney Island Mardi Gras parades of the early 20th century. During this era, Coney Island was the primary amusement park destination for those in the New York area. Like the much larger annual Village Halloween Parade, the Mermaid Parade embodies the spirit and artistry of Mardi Gras.

The event sometimes attracts a couple of thousand actual participants, along with hundreds of thousands of spectators, some of whom have traveled to Coney Island’s beach primarily to escape the heat which often marks the beginning of summer.

The Mermaid parade is well-known for extraordinary marine costumes, and for the occasional partial nudity. (This is not as surprising as it may sound, because it is legal in New York State for women to be topless in public, as long as this is not part of a business venture.) The parade is however very much a family event; it is quite common for at least one little girl’s birthday party to march as part of the parade. There are sections in the parade for vehicles of all kinds, for floats, for groups, and for individuals. Mermaids and sea creatures of every shape and size are represented, and the audience is festive and appreciative.

Each year the Mermaid Parade features a merman and mermaid King and Queen. In 2005 the King was David Johansen (Buster Poindexter) and the Queen was Karmen Guy (Mad Juana). In other years, David Byrne, Queen Latifah, Adam Savage, Harvey Keitel, and Moby have filled the royal seats. In the 2010 parade, the King will be Lou Reed and the Queen Laurie Anderson.

The organizers of the parade claim to encourage bribery, so that participants have a better chance to win the various costume contests, which are also part of the day’s entertainment.

The plane overshot the hilltop runway where it was landing in one of India’s trickiest airports, in the city of Mangalore, which sits in the Western Ghats, or hills, on India’s southwestern coast.

Aviation officials said that the pilot of the Boeing 737 missed the landing threshold, a critical portion of the runway at airports where runways are shorter because of hilly terrain, by as much as 2,000 feet. The plane veered off the runway and struck a concrete navigational aid called a localizer, according to Praful Patel, India’s aviation minister.

“The wing fell of and the aircraft plunged into the valley,” Mr. Patel told reporters at a news conference.

Seven people survived the crash, according to the financially troubled airline, which is owned and operated by the Indian government.

“As soon as we landed, the tire burst,” one of the survivors told a local television crew from his hospital bed. “Within three seconds there was a fire blast. The inside was filled with smoke.”

He said he escaped through a crack in the fuselage.

Aviation officials said that the weather was clear, with six kilometers of visibility, and no rain. The plane’s pilot had landed the same aircraft on the Mangalore runway 19 times before. And while the runway is shorter than others in major Indian airports, it was more than adequate for landing a Boeing 737, aviation safety experts said.

The flight is popular with migrants from southern India, millions of whom work as laborers in construction sites in the Persian Gulf.

Rescue workers scrambled over the smoldering crash site, looking for more survivors among the charred remains, but there was little hope of finding anyone else alive.

The crash, at an airport with a short runway built on a plateau and surrounded by cliffs, is likely to renew debate about safety standards in India’s rapidly expanding aviation sector. Some Indian aviation safety experts have expressed increasing concern in the last couple of years about the country’s airlines, airports and regulations. Last year, there were three near-miss collisions between planes at the airport in Mumbai, the country’s commercial capital.

Air India, in particular, has been in the news for a number of embarrassing incidents, including a midair scuffle between pilots and flight attendants during which the plane was reportedly unmanned for a few minutes. In September, an Air India flight to Toronto was delayed 11 hours while staff searched for rats that had climbed aboard the plane.

As investigators rushed to the smoldering wreckage, experts said the unusual configuration of the runway made landing there complicated.

Kapil Kaul, the chief executive of India and the Middle East at the Center for Asia Pacific Aviation, a research group, said pilot error was a likely cause. The pilot had 7,500 hours of flying experience, 3,500 of which were on this type of plane, Mr. Kaul said. But he may have missed the landing threshold, which is the very first part of a runway usable for landing, he said. That kind of error doesn’t always result in a crash, but did at the Mangalore Airport because it is on a plateau.

The plane, a Boeing 737-800, was relatively new, having made its first flight in December 2007, according to the Aviation Safety Network.

The 737-800 has been involved in five fatal accidents since entering service in 1998. The most recent was in January, an Ethiopian Airlines flight to Addis Ababa that crashed into the Mediterranean Sea in stormy weather shortly after takeoff from Beirut, killing 90 people. The cause of that accident remains under investigation.

In February 2009, nine people died when a Boeing 737-800 operated by Turkish Airlines crashed on approach near Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport. Dutch investigators identified a faulty altimeter, which caused the plane to slow down too abruptly and stall at an altitude of around 2,000 feet.

Sanat Kaul, a former aviation ministry official and a former member of Air India’s board of directors, said the runway at Mangalore airport sits on a plateau and was extended to 8,000 feet, from 5,500 feet in 2006 to better accommodate bigger planes like the 737.

“Mangalore is a difficult field because it is on a plateau,” he said. “From all accounts the visibility was all right. One can’t make any conclusions. The runway was extended to 8,000 feet in 2006. That is all right for landing” a 737.

The airline said 160 passengers were on board, four of them infants, along with six crewmembers.

Air India, which is owned and run by the Indian government, has been struggling since a 2007 merger with another state carrier, and lost $1.2 billion in the last fiscal year. Competition from new private airlines like Kingfisher and Jet Airways is luring away customers, and the company is focusing on cutting costs by trimming staff and routes.

Many safety consultants blame the government for weak policies and spotty enforcement.

“Aviation safety is a potent subject in America while it is an impotent one in India,” A. Ranganathan, a former pilot and safety consultant, wrote in The Hindu newspaper late last year. “We are impotent because we have an ineffective hierarchy — ministry, legislators and regulator — controlling aviation.”

If most of the passengers have been killed, as is feared, this would be the worst airline disaster in India since 1996, when an Air Kazakhstan flight collided with a Saudi Arabia Airlines flight in midair above Delhi airport, killing 312 people.

The last major airline accident in India was in 2000, when an Alliance Air Boeing 737 plane crashed into a neighborhood while trying to land at an airport in Patna, killing about 60 people.