My Marie Curie Project SEPOLCRI examines the funerary rituals and burial practices of religious minorities in Italian cities between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to demonstrate the role and importance of these rituals in defining communities, identities, and relationships between minorities and the dominant group community. Death, its rituals, and spaces played a key role in early modern culture, however Catholic Canon Law forbade the mixing of members of different confessions and religions during rituals and prohibited the burial of non-Catholics, heretics and ex-communicated subjects in consecrated cemeteries and churches. Yet, despite formal prohibitions, exceptions in which rituals were attended by Catholics and non-Catholics were buried in consecrated grounds were the norm. The project brings to the forefront the importance of death and related practices in investigating cross-cultural exchanges and encounters, issues of toleration and negotiation within the culturally diverse environment of early modern Italian cities.