As The Sun Falls

V

-Time during on Poveglia Island-

They say the most precious things to happen to you happen at the very moment you least expect it. Amadeo never experienced this first hand in his life but when he got to the Poveglia he understood.

He was raised with a silver spoon in his mouth and never lifted a hand for anything. Yet when he requested to be sent he finally understood the pain and outcome of the pit. It opened his eyes to understand the real meaning of sacrifices.

On Poveglia there were legends around his sibling and one was to be written about him. So he made sure to detail everything he learned in the three months he had been there. He wrote in a black journal and only titled the entry with the month he stayed. By the end of the third month he truly knew what forgiveness and love was.

Month of August Entry:

To my family,

    It's been three weeks since I've been in the pit. I've come to find it's an island that is surrounded by water and is home to the natives that live by their own rules. Yet they treat newcomers as dirt on the bottom of their feet. When I arrived I was thrown into an arena to fight as a barbarian to prove I would be a champion. Although I found out the hard way that if you do not win then you get a stale piece of bread and a glass of water. My once perfect body was filled with scars and wounds that show my losses.

Yet when you win you are bathed in gifts and glory. You are given a bath and haircut in the royal champion bath as many men and women cater to you. I have lost many of the fights but I have won and learned from the losses. As I won I was brought to the council bonfires and told the history of the island and the history of their gods. Many of those who had decided to stay became great warriors and who battled in the arenas but many never lost their life as it was not wise to kill in the manner of fun. I had learned that the island was once filled with bad history but it was never a big issue for the natives.

The island of Poveglia was in the south lagoon between Venice and Lido and sat as a small italian island. For many centuries it was a home to be for a refuge, stronghold, place of exile and a dumping ground for the diseased, dying and deceased. The history of Poveglia had started long ago when it welcomed its first inhabitants -- men, women and children who fled the barbaric invaders that had ravaged the mainland. It was small and defendable and many armies did not see the worth of trouble trying to invade. Poveglia was a community that was peaceful and saw no means for taxes or laws from the mainland. Yet as the centiers went on around the 14th one the population had vanished and the island became abandoned once more.

However that was just part of the history. They had warned me that the next few years of the history was horrifying and saddening. In 1348 the Bubonic Plague had arrived in full force in Venice and Poveglia and as a small island it became home to a quarantine colony. The disease  killed 1 out of 3 Europeans. Venice, fearing the unbridled spread of the disease,  exiled many of its symptom-bearing citizens here on Poveglia. The Poveglia center held the dead. Many of  those too sick to protest were burned on giant pyres. Tens of thousands of  citizens in  Venice Dying on the mainland. Later on in  1630 when the Black Death again swept through the city the  fires would burn once more.

Later on the history became worse from then on. In the 1800s, the area's mentally ill resided here in an asylum in Poveglia. It was poorly constructed and was used as a place of exile more than a rehabilitation. Rumors spread like wildfire surrounding the asylum in the 1930s. It was said a doctor performed strange experiments on the patients on the island but the doctor eventually went mad and threw himself from the asylum's tall bell tower. Lastly though man say you can still hear the bells chimes echo from the  island.Even though the bell in the tower was removed decades ago