Posted 6/13/2009 01:14:00 PM by Douglas

Here's a lovely vacation destination: Poveglia. Come for the plague, stay for the charred bones.

Several thousand people were gathered and quarantined on the island, where they died together. You can write that off as a crazy decision symptomatic of a time when people presumably still pooped in holes in the ground and thought the sun was a chariot, but not a few centuries later, when everyone did the exact same thing again.

When the Bubonic plague tore through Europe, the island was reinstated to its former "glory;" a final vacation spot for anyone with the plague. When the plague got worse, they lowered Poveglia's requirements from "plague sufferers" to "anybody with any sign of sickness at all." They also changed their policy of "let the infected die peacefully" to "throw them in a large pit (atop already-dead bodies), and set them on fire," which, was quite a leap. Estimates put the death toll at 160,000 on the island, where charred bones still wash up on shore.

Parking was ample.