Mystical places in Italy
3 legends · 2 cities
Regions and cities
Basilicata1
Friuli – Venezia Giulia1
Veneto1
By kind of place
All places
Villa Santina and Rapuzzi's Drawing
On 14 August 1947, six weeks after Kenneth Arnold's flight, an artist named Rapuzzi Johannis was walking in the mountains near this village in Friuli when, by his account, he met two short beings in tight suits and, behind them, a lens-shaped craft. He said they took his pencil and his drawing from him. At home he drew what he had seen. He gave the drawing and a full description to Italian researchers only in the 1960s. It is one of the earliest European contact reports and the first of its kind in Italy; its value is chiefly chronological — it appeared before the genre it would later be said to imitate had formed at all.
Craco
A medieval town on a rocky ridge in Basilicata, abandoned in the 1960s–70s after landslides and an earthquake. Its empty stone houses and bell tower on a bare hill have repeatedly served as a film set.
Poveglia Island
An island in the Venetian Lagoon that served for centuries as a plague quarantine station and later a psychiatric hospital. Today it's abandoned and closed to casual visitors.