Disinterment
Farinelli's remains were disinterred from the Certosa cemetery on 12 July 2006. The stacking of the bones had degraded the condition of Farinelli's remains, but these included his jawbone, several teeth, parts of his skull and almost all of the major bones. Florentine antiquarian Alberto Bruschi and Luigi Verdi, Secretary of the Farinelli Study Centre, co-ordinator and general manager of the project, promoted the exhumation. The next day Carlo Vitali of the Farinelli Study Centre stated that the major bones were "long and sturdy, which would correspond with Farinelli's official portraits, as well as the castrati's reputation for being unusually tall." Maria Giovanna Belcastro of the Anthropology Institute of Bologna University, Gino Fornaciari, paleoanthropologist of the University of Pisa, and David Howard, engineer of York University are charged with deriving such new data on Farinelli and his lifestyle, habits and possible diseases, as well as the physiology of a castrato, as can be retrieved from these remains. Their research methods will include X-rays, CAT scans and DNA sampling.
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