Inside Poveglia Island’s History Of Death And Madness

Inside Poveglia Island’s History Of Death And Madness

“It looked like hell. The sick lay three or four in a bed. Workers collected the dead and threw them in the graves all day without a break. Often the dying ones and the ones too sick to move or talk were taken for dead and thrown on the piled corpses."

See the photos and step inside the nightmarish Italian island used to quarantine 160,000 victims of the Black Death by clicking the link in our bio.

Venice's Poveglia Island was a quarantine center and mass grave for victims of bubonic plague, earning it the nickname the "Island of Ghosts."

In the Venetian lagoon sits Poveglia Island, a small, unpopulated landmass cut down the middle by a canal. For all its unassuming appearance, however, it has a dark history and is said to be one of the most haunted places in Europe, a continent saturated with tales of ghosts and the paranormal.

Many of those ghosts came courtesy of the Black Death, which swept through Europe in the 14th century, killing off millions of people and cutting the entire population of some cities in half in a matter of months or even weeks. And the bubonic plague didn’t stop after the famous outbreak of 1348. Instead, it reappeared again and again for centuries.

In Venice — Europe’s dominant trading port during the late Middle Ages and Renaissance — officials took advantage of the Venetian lagoon’s islands to isolate and manage its plague outbreaks. For centuries, Poveglia Island was Venice’s solution to the plague: An isolated quarantine site where victims of the plague were sent after infection with few ever leaving the island again.

The small island, just 17 acres, housed over 160,000 plague victims through the centuries and officials did more than just quarantine the sick and soon to die. They burned the corpses to stop the spread of the disease and it is said that human ash from these cremations make up more than 50 percent of the island’s soil, even centuries later. It sounds like Hell, just in Northern Italy.

The picturesque Venetian Lagoon houses 166 islands, including a small island directly south of the Piazza San Marco. Known as Poveglia Island, the small dot of land has housed people since at least the fifth century when Romans escaped Goth and Hun invasions by fleeing to more defensible islands in the lagoon.

As Venice grew into a major power, Poveglia became an important defensive location. In the 14th century, the Venetians built a fort on the island, establishing an outpost that could destroy enemy ships that tried to reach the city of Venice.