Italy
Every logged mystery in this country.
- Sicily
Capuchin Catacombs of Palermo
More than 1,200 dead Sicilians, mummified or reduced to skeletons, stand in niches and lie on shelves in the corridors beneath a Palermo monastery, many in clothes they chose. Among them is a girl who died just before her second birthday, so well preserved that visitors swear she opens her eyes.
- Sicily
Caravaggio's Stolen Nativity, Oratorio di San Lorenzo
The Italian parliament's Antimafia commission dates the theft of Caravaggio's Nativity from the Oratorio di San Lorenzo to the night of October 17 to 18, 1969, though the Oratory's operator says the canvas was last seen at Mass on October 12. The thieves cut it from its frame with a blade. The FBI values it at $20 million. Informants have described it as destroyed, buried in an iron chest, or cut up and sold to a Swiss dealer, and nothing has been recovered.
- Campania
Cimitero delle Fontanelle
A tuff cave beneath the Sanità district of Naples holding the bones of thousands of anonymous dead, and the home of a devotion the Church banned in 1969 and never managed to end: adopting a skull, cleaning it, learning its name in a dream, and praying for it in exchange for favors. Shut since 2019, the cemetery reopened in April 2026.
- Veneto
Poveglia Island
Municipal records say the buildings reopened in 1922 as a casa di riposo, a home for the elderly. A sign reading psychiatric ward is still legible on the entrance wall. For the doctor, the hammer lobotomies, and the fall from the bell tower that made the island famous, nobody has produced a document.
- Lazio (Viterbo)
Sacro Bosco (Parco dei Mostri)
On the base of a stone sphinx at the entrance to Vicino Orsini's wood at Bomarzo, an inscription asks whether so many marvels were made "per inganno o pur per arte," to deceive or for art. Past the sphinx, figures carved from the bedrock in the 1500s include an elephant gripping a soldier in its trunk, a house built on a tilt, and an ogre whose open mouth is a room with a stone table, with "OGNI PENSIERO VOLA" lettered on its lip. Orsini called the place his boschetto, his little wood. Scholars still disagree on what he meant by it and on who designed it. The wood lay overgrown for centuries until the Bettini family bought it in the 1950s and began restoring it in 1960.