Italian island for sale!
If ghosts don’t bother you and you’d hardly blink at the specter of a wailing child on your balcony, please note the uninhabited and spooky Venetian island of Poveglia is for sale. This week, the Italian government announced a public auction of the 17-acre island, just ten minutes by boat from St. Mark’s Square, but abandoned for the last 50 years and widely reported to be among the world’s most haunted places.
Technically, it's a real estate agent's nightmare: The island has a horrific past. Having survived foreign invasions for centuries, the island became a burial ground for thousands quarantined there because of plague. In the 1920s, it housed a hospital reportedly led by a mad doctor who performed crude surgery on his patients’ brains. (Though none of that has stopped the Italian government from hoping it'll be turned into a luxury hotel).
The online auction (bids are due by May 6) is hoped to ease Italy’s massive public debt of $2.6 trillion. Bids begin at $490,000. A further four state-owned properties across Italy, including a monastery in Puglia and a 15th century castle on the Slovenian border, are expected to go under the gavel.
Don't have a spare $490,000 floating around? No problem: Bids are also open to groups. In fact, Giorgio Orsoni, the mayor of Venice, and some of his cohorts are forking over 99 euros ($137) each in the hope of snagging Poveglia for themselves. Note: At $137 a pop, Orsoni will need 3,577 of his closest friends to contribute just to make the opening bid...
