Italian Civilization
by: Emily Yurchison
Italy has had civilizations living on it for thousands of years longer than. Italy has been the ground on which countless battles have been fought. Italy has survived emperors both terrible and less terrible. Italy has stories to tell. And I intend to tell at least some of them.
Let’s start in Rome, evidently the “capital of catacombs.” Underneath Rome are hundreds of kilometers of catacombs both known and unknown. Some are well visited, and some remain unexplored. All of them are filled with dead bodies.
The oldest catacombs date back to the first century when Jewish people used them as cemeteries, according to atlasobscura.com. Then the Christians copied them and did the same thing. All of the Christian catacombs “belong” (I use that term loosely) to the Vatican. That just means the Vatican controls who was buried in them. As it turns out, the Vatican doesn’t let anyone go into the Christian catacombs, not even archaeologists most of the time. A lot of archaeologists find this (understandably) frustrating.
The first catacomb I’m writing about is the Santa Maria della Concezione Crypts or the Capuchin Crypt in Rome. Around 4000 Capuchin friars eternally rest there. In 1631 the Capuchin friars left the St. Bonaventure friary to go to the Santa Maria della Concezione. The name Capuchin comes not from the monkey, but from the hoods on their habits, which were called capuche, according to atlas.com. So they left St. Bonaventure near the Trevi Fountain to come to Santa Maria, and today only the church and catacombs remain. Photography is prohibited, but you can schedule a tour of the crypt.
Pope Urban VIII commissioned the church because his brother was a Capuchin friar, as written in a number of sources, and he told them to bring with them the remains of other deceased capuchin friars to their new locations so all of the Capuchin friars could be buried in the same place. But rather than just bury the remains as most would do, the monks decorated the walls with the bones as a reminder that life is short and one must always be ready to meet God.
The catacombs have a crypt of skulls, a crypt of leg bones and a crypt of pelvises among others. There’s a plaque in the catacombs that reads, “What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be.” It has mummified monks dressed in friars’ clothes hanging from the ceiling, and because we have electricity and light now, those hanging monks were turned into light fixtures.
Rome is known as the eternal city, and it houses some of the most beautiful architecture in the world. But Rome also houses the Zuccari Palace, which yes, is beautiful but mostly strange. It’s also known as the Monster House because of the large monster faces that appear to be eating the doors and windows. The palace was built by famous Baroque artist Federico Zuccari in 1590 and drew inspiration from the Gardens of Bomarzo in a northern town in Italy, according to atlas.com. The palace now holds the Max Planck Institute for Art History.
There used to be a museum of criminology in Rome as well, but it’s closed down. The museum started in 1873, and it was essentially a collection of devices used to torture and discipline prisoners. It also showcased artifacts from well-known criminals of the 20th century. Unfortunately, the museum is permanently closed.
As it turns out, keeping the bones of the dead in fancy buildings isn’t just a Roma thing. In Milan there is an ossuary that was built in 1912. It was created because the graveyard of a nearby hospital was overflowing. Thus, the San Bernadino alle Ossa was born. It is now just a small room as part of the church, atlas.com states, with the bones of hospital patrons on display.
Milan is all about hustle and bustle. It’s among the biggest cities in Italy, so it’s no surprise that just outside of Milan is a neighborhood called the Zone of Silence. It’s tucked away from the traffic of Corso Venezia, and it was the gracious inner suburb of the landed aristocracy, according to an Independent newspaper article from 2011. The houses from the Middle Ages have transitioned to modernist design
Normally the zone would go unnoticed, but one building, the Casa Sola-Busca, has a rather strange decoration outside its door, a bronze statue of an ear, which was a doorbell before doorbells were common, according to atlasobscura.com. Guests would announce themselves into the ear, as it was equipped with an early intercom. The current tenants tired of people shouting into it, though, and got rid of it.
There is an island less than half a mile away from Venice called Poveglia, and it’s known as Italy’s most haunted island, which is a great, albeit not difficult, title to win.
Poveglia was used in the Dark Ages, way back to the 400s, to quarantine people who had the plague because back then Italians thought the best way to deal with the sick was to just put them on one island together to essentially die.
The island is said to have hosted over 160,000 sick souls before people finally realized that there are better ways to treat the sick. Some locals say over 50% of the soil in Poveglia is made up of human remains, a fact you can find on a number of tourist websites about the island.
Also at one point Napoleon used to use Poveglia to store weapons, which doesn’t really seem worth the risk to me. Regardless if you believe in ghosts or not, there is some bad energy on that island. Several small battles took place there because of Napoleon’s weapons.
But I’m STILL not done with all of the horrible uses of the island. In 1922, the island was used as an insane asylum. So that comes with the usual horrors of insane asylums like doctors torturing patients and mass graves and general tortured spirits. The hospital was closed in 1968 and has been ever since, according to atlasobscura.com. The government doesn’t let people visit the island unless you get clearance from them, and that seems to be really difficult. I’ve also heard rumors that if you find a local fisherman and pay him enough, he’ll take you to Poveglia.
In 2016 a group of kids were rescued from the island, because they said once it got dark the island started terrorizing them. They screamed for help and a local on a boat heard and called authorities to rescue them.
Venice itself is a series of islands connected by bridges, but there are also dozens of islands surrounding the main city of Venice. One of them, Lazzaretto Nuovo, is also referred to as a plague island. Lazzaretto Nuovo means “New Quarantine. If you’re thinking an island called “New Quarantine” suggests that there is an “Old Quarantine,” then you’d be correct. There is in fact another plague island that our Venice tour guide Elena told us about.
I’m not writing about the old one, though. I’m writing about the new one because while workers were unearthing one of the many mass plague graves on the island, they found a skull of a woman with a brick jammed into her mouth. This happened to be an old method used to kill vampires.
Scientists studied the skull and concluded that the mystery woman was between 61 and 71 years old and suspected she was a “shroud eater,” which is a type of vampire associated with Germany. Apparently the people of the island took matters into their own hands and killed her.
The last but certainly not least of Venice’s many islands is San Giorgio in Alga, which translates to “St. George in the Seaweed.” The first humans set foot on the island in 1000 when it was turned into a monastery. It remained a monastery for a number of different groups until it was abandoned in the 13th century. Then the island belonged to a clerical order for a while until a huge fire swept the island in the 1700s. By 1799 it was turned into a political prison for Venetians who voiced anti-Austrian views.
During WWI, bunkers were built but never used on the island, and then during WWII the Nazis used the island to train divers to plant mines in the middle of the night, according to atlasobscura.com. Since then the island has remained abandoned. You can still visit the island today. It’s just a short ferry ride away.
The amount of interesting history in the entire country of Italy is simply endless. This is just a very small sample of that history. To learn more about the obscure history of Italy and other countries across the world, check out atlasobscura.com.