Venice’s buildings were famously built on millions of wooden piles driven into marshy lagoon floor, but the lagoon itself is not one giant man-made raft. It contains natural, marshy, reclaimed, and artificial islands, formed over thousands of years by rising seas and sediment. Many were drained, reinforced, or made habitable. None, however, have been quite as thoroughly crapped on by humanity as Poveglia.
Poveglia is not a floating city-on-pilings fantasy. It is one of the lagoon’s old, battered islands, a real piece of marshy Venetian geography that humans kept repurposing until the place had been so abused it made our skin crawl.
Rumored to have been a plague island during the 1348 Black Death, Poveglia’s soil is often fantastically described as fifty percent ash from burnt victims. In the 18th century, it became a quarantine checkpoint, and in the 19th century, a mental asylum supposedly run by a stereotypical mad doctor.
In 1968, after its last hospital closed, humanity finally became convinced it was time to stop torturing this place and GTFO. Now, it is a seriously creepy forbidden island; however, it seems some locals want to give creepiness a chance and turn it into a private park just for them. Reading the room, or rather the island, is not humanity’s strong suit.
Poveglia was not man-made. Its bad vibes were.
In Siena, there is a plexiglass window on about the sixth level underground in the old hospital building. Behind the plexiglass are the bones of some of the black plague victims. Very creepy.