What do you think about this?
In the Venetian lagoon, a short boat ride from one of the most beautiful cities on earth, sits a small island that has been closed to the public for decades. Poveglia.
For generations it was where Venice sent its dying. During waves of the plague, the sick were shipped there to be quarantined, and when they died their bodies were burned in pits on the island. Locals will tell you the soil is more ash than earth. Later, in the early 1900s, a hospital there was used as an asylum, and the stories say a doctor experimented on patients before falling, or jumping, from the bell tower.
Today the buildings are collapsing and the island is still shut to visitors. Fishermen still steer around the water near it.
Makes you wonder what a place absorbs after that many people suffer and die on it.
An overactive imagination fed by a grim history, or a piece of ground that truly holds onto something? What do you think is still on Poveglia?
What do you think about this? In 1974 a farmer in Sardinia struck stone and uncovered an army of giants, dozens of statues over seven feet tall with double circle eyes, around three thousand years old. Someone smashed them and buried them. What were the giants meant to be?
What do you think about this? On the coast of Brittany stand more than three thousand stones in rows that run for miles, raised before Stonehenge and before the pyramids. Nobody left an explanation. A lost astronomy, a forgotten faith, or something we have no word for?
What do you think about this? In 1963 a man in Turkey knocked out a basement wall and found a city cut eighteen levels down, with stone doors that sealed from the inside and room for twenty thousand people. Nobody is certain who dug it. What were they hiding from?
What do you think about this? In 1934 the LA Times ran a front page story about a labyrinth under downtown built by an ancient Lizard People. The city let a mining engineer sink a shaft 250 feet down. Then the money ran out. A fantasy, or a real anomaly under the city?
What do you think about this? In Cholula, Mexico there is a hill with a pretty yellow church on top. It is the largest pyramid ever built, bigger by volume than Giza, swallowed by grass until it looked like ordinary ground. Lost knowledge, deliberate burial, or just time?
What do you think about this? A short boat ride from Venice sits Poveglia, an island so tied to plague dead and a shuttered asylum that it has been closed to visitors for decades. Fishermen steer around it. Grim history and imagination, or ground that holds onto something?
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