A Haunted Island, Poveglia

The island, Poveglia, was put up for auction on condition that Italian government leases the island for 99 years. As you can see the map, the island is located on an excellent place where is between Venice and Lido in northern Italy, and it is picturesque surroundings. It looks like Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

             
            How much are you willing to pay for it if you have enough money? 500 billion dollars or more? You cannot control your shock if you know how much the island was auctioned off. It was awarded 513,000 euros(about 700,000 dollars) by Luigi Brugnaro, an Italian businessman. Could you believe it? Is it so cheap, isn’t it?

There are horror stories about the island. After you know the stories, you will nod your head why the bid is dirt cheap. When the Black Death had been a raging epidemic in the 14^th century, the Italian government isolated patients from Venice. The government sent them to the island because the Venice had a fetid smell of dead corpses. People made a big hole, dumped the bodies in the pit, and burnt them off. What was worse, some people who were showing symptoms were burnt with corpses. Of course, it couldn’t be helped because there was no alternative. However, whenever I am faced with remorseless events, people do anything no matter how it is cruel. More than 160 thousand people died in the island, and the island was covered with ashes of them. If people see ghosts in the island, it might be true.

Unfortunately, this is not the last. A person built a mental hospital in 1922. Strangely, patients began to die off without any special reason. Was it because of the curse of ghosts?  Maybe many people thought that way. One day, the director of the hospital committed suicide by drowning. After his death, people knew a startling discovery: he did medical experiments on patients, and the reason of the strange death of patients was his experiments. A new rumor began to circulate. The rumor was that the reason of his death was not a suicide, but it was because of ashes of infectious cases. The ashes strangled his neck, and he died. True or not, people started to leave the island. The island changed to haunted island?

Now what do you think about the winning price? Is it still cheap?

Soon you can visit the island because the successful bidder is changing the island from haunted island to a tourist spot. Do you want to visit the place?  I don’t.

The Positive Effects of the Black Death

Nothing is important than people’s lives. In that regard the Black Death that killed innumerable people was a calamity. However, there is no positive influence because of the Black Death? During this week, I collected research data about the positive impacts of the Black Death. After I read web pages, I found that the Black Death has been a blessing to the medieval people after the plague.

                 At first, the plague caused the collapse of a feudal society. The Middle age society was dependent on feudal system, so there was little movement among and between classes.  For nearly a thousand years, the feudal Europe was a class-ridden society which was dominated by feudal lords and Catholic churches. Furthermore, 90% of people was peasants, worked hard, and died young.  Population reduction caused the shortage of labor. The society based on a labor-intensive agriculture work was forced to be collapsed and the value of the labor increased significantly. Also, the severe shortage affected mechanization and the invention of printing by Gutenberg in 1445. Probably, if the Black Death had not happened, the feudal society have sustained for a long time. The development of Europe would be delayed.

Christ the Saviour in the Tree of Life                     Birth of Venus
            (The Middle Age)                                     ( Renaissance)

               Secondly, a wind of change was blowing through religion. The Middle age people were apt to entirely depend on religion. They clung to religion to cure the Black Death, but the Catholic churches were not totally in control of the disease. In addition, after people saw the death of priests, they started leaving the churches because they believed that the priests were representative of God, but the priests dead as same as normal people. The influence of religion on the society was played out and people started to have interested in human and nature. As a result, humanism began to germinate in people’s thought and this change led to Renaissance. 

                Of course, the development of society cannot be exchanged for the lives of people. However, it is an undeniable fact that the Black Death made positive changes of the medieval society. I think that most of historical events have two sides of the same coin. That can apply to individual, too. Sometimes, I only focused the bad events when something bad happened. There might have been better things because of a contretemps.  I trust that “Every cloud has a silver lining”.