Today’s National Geographic feed has an amazing photo gallery of the Italian island of Lazzaretto Vecchio, an Italian site where victims of Bubonic Plague were sent. 1,500 of them have been found in a mass grave on the island.
Just a few miles from Venice’s Piazza San Marco, the island was the site of a hospital in the mid-1800s when the Plague struck the city. However, it had been used for isolating Plague victims as far back as the 15th or 16th century, and the earliest graves on the island are neatly constructed. Later graves are just huge pits where “monatti,” or “corpse carriers,” were upended with great loads of bodies.
Link.
Photo via National Geographic.