Posted by Poveglia is an island in the southern Venetian Lagoon, inhabited since the early Middle Ages and devastated during the War of Chioggia. From 1776 it was a quarantine station and lazaret, and from 1922 to 1968 a nursing home that many believe was an asylum. Today it is famous for its ghosts, and since 2025 its northern part has been entrusted to the association Poveglia per tutti to become a public park.
Poveglia Island is possibly one of the most famous mysterious places in Italy, together with the asylum of Aguscello.
Today the island is famous because it’s presumably inhabited by the ghosts of all the people who, throughout history, were sent to die on the island.
Everyone knows of the asylum in Poveglia, closed in 1968, whose remains are still visible on the island. But how was this mysterious island before 1922, the year the facility opened?
The ghosts present now are only the victims of the asylum, or are there many more restless souls?
Poveglia and the Black Death
Before being inhabited by ghosts, Poveglia was inhabited by people. In the year 864, for example, it was inhabited by roughly 200 families. Those were the families of the 200 most faithful servants of Doge Pietro Tradonico, who was murdered in the year 864. The next doge, Orso I Partecipazio, allowed these families to settle on the island of Poveglia, in the southern Venetian Lagoon, opposite Malamocco. For centuries it was a thriving centre living off fishing and salt pans. During the War of Chioggia between Venice and Genoa (1378-1381) the population was evacuated to Venice, and the island, occupied by the Genoese admiral Pietro Doria, was devastated. Since then it has remained virtually uninhabited.
It was at the end of the 18th century that the island regained a function: from 1776, and for more than a century, it became a quarantine station for incoming ships and, when needed, a lazaret for people with plague and other contagious diseases. According to tradition, the bodies of plague victims were also burned and buried in mass graves on the island, the disease that for centuries had struck Europe as the “Black Death”.
Later on, however, the sick too are sent the island, in a quarantine that very often ended with the death of the individuals.
Poveglia and the asylum
In 1922 the island’s buildings were converted into a facility that was officially a nursing and long-term care home for the elderly, which closed in 1968. However today it is known as a mental hospital because this was probably its real function: a structure to house mentally ill patients.
This is also clear from the written readable even today on the ruins of the structure, one of which just says “psychiatry“.
Unfortunately, we know that in the first half of the 20th century mental patients were often mistreated and subjected to treatment that today we would easily call torture, such as cold water baths, shock treatment and lobotomy.
And it is precisely during the period of the asylum’s opening and after closing that the island there’s a large spike of strange sightings.
Many claim that these are all the souls of people who died in awful pain and were forgotten by everyone, the reason behind those strange phenomena and sightings.
Poveglia today
Currently Poveglia is technically closed to tourists and uninhabited. However, many people have traveled to explore this island full of mystery and macabre fascination.
In 2014 the state auctioned a 99-year lease on the island. The highest bid, 513,000 euros, came from businessman Luigi Brugnaro, who later became mayor of Venice, but the deal did not go through. That same year citizens founded the association Poveglia per tutti, which raised 460,000 euros from more than 4,500 people to prevent privatisation. After years of legal battles, on 1 August 2025 the association obtained a 6-year concession for the northern part of the island, to turn it into a public park.
If some brave person wanted to go there in person, by requesting a permit to the municipality of Venice, bear in mind that the property is unsafe and perhaps the real danger, more than ghosts, may be the structure itself.
Over time there have been brave people who ventured on the island in search of a thrill. For some, perhaps, the thrill was too much as in the case of the American tourists who, after arriving on the island, got scared to death and asked for help to return to the mainland.
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