In contemporary, post-modern and post-deconstructionist society, when we talk about 'conservation' in the heritage sphere, we are inevitably also talking about processes of heritagization and thus of heritage-making as a form of institutionalization. In the global macro-scenario, this is linked to social, political and economic movements - what Appadurai would call -scapes - which also involve bottom-up narratives, expectations, and symbolic manipulations, connected to, variously led and variously interpretable, mechanisms of representation and self-representation. On a small scale, in places far removed from these wide-ranging programs and from media and touristic attention, the desire to preserve/conserve elements of the historical or religious substratum, and to intercept, even if only in reverberation, these large-scale dynamics, manifests itself in valorization plans that at times seem to be unrelated to the sense 'of community' that cultural anthropology has so often observed and investigated in relation to heritage. In Burgio, a town of two thousand inhabitants in southwestern Sicily, the creation of a "Museum of Mummies" was a way of attempting to enhance an historical-religious heritage that had been forgotten for some time: a collection of fifty mummified bodies of components of the clergy, as well as of laypeople, dating back to the Modern Age. The museum's role is microscopic in the hyper-competitive Sicilian tourist scene, and marginal in the socio-cultural life of the town, so why conserve (and exhibit) these mummified corpses? The paper aims to answer to this question sharing ethnographic consideration on the specific case-study, while critically reflecting on the meaning and the dynamics of conservation practices concerning human remains and religious heritage contexts.