Just off Italy’s southern coast, there is a rocky island believed to be so cursed that many locals refuse to go near it.
Embedded within the wave-beaten outcrop, a tiny abandoned villa lies, all but in ruins, a mere 100 feet from the coastline of Posillipo, an affluent residential area of Naples. The island consists of two lumps of rock connected by a stone bridge. Known as Gaiola Island (or Isola della Gaoila), tourists, perhaps naively, flock here to snap holiday photos, unaware of her haunted past.
Maybe if they knew, they would steer clear as locals say it is infected with “Gaiola Malediction”—or the Galiola curse. That’s easy to dismiss as superstition or overblown folklore until one considers the strange sequence of events, deaths, and happenings surrounding the place.
Later, in 1871 a wealthy businessman named Luigi de Negri bought the island and built an elegant villa there, the remains of which still stand today. Shortly afterward, De Negri suffered financial ruin that resulted in the collapse of his fish farming empire.
Fittingly perhaps, a maritime engineer named Nelson Foley, the brother-in-law of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mystery novels, purchased Gaiola.
And he sold it to travel writer Norman Douglas in around 1896, who sold it back to Foley seven years later.
In 1911, in a sinister twist, ship Captain Gaspare Albenga, rumored to have been interested in buying the island, hit rocks while touring around it and drowned. Some say neither the captain’s body nor the ship were found.
Swiss businessman Hans Braun moved onto Gaiola with his wife in the 1920s. He was later discovered murdered and wrapped in a rug in the villa. Soon afterward, his wife was found drowned in the ocean amid perplexing circumstances.
The next owners didn’t fare any better. Otto Grunback, a German perfume dealer, died from a heart attack on the island. When Swiss pharmacist Maurice-Yves Sandoz tried his luck, he sadly suffered a mental breakdown, was committed to a mental asylum in Switzerland, and then took his own life.
Needless to say, their dreams were dashed beneath her rocky feet. Like Luigi de Negri decades earlier, German steel mogul Baron Karl Paul Langheim’s fortune tanked after buying Gaiola. This was attributed to wild living.
Billionaire John Paul Getty is another notable name linked to the island. In 1973, the oil tycoon’s grandson was found alive in Naples after being kidnapped by an Italian gang, while much of his own life was plagued by catastrophe.
The famous head of the car company Fiat, Gianni Agnelli, once Italy’s richest man, owned the island in the latter half of the century. Tragically, in 2000 his son Edoardo was found dead under a bridge, an apparent suicide. Agnelli’s young nephew Umberto, whom he was mentoring to take over the family business, died of a rare cancer three years earlier.
The last private owner of Gaiola was insurance company head Gianpasquale Grappone, who wound up in jail while his wife died in a car accident.
The mystery surrounding Gaiola doesn’t stop there. The waters lapping the islets are home to sunken Roman ruins, visible at a depth of 10 feet. This unique archaeological park, dubbed Parco Sommerso di Gaiola, includes the island itself, now owned by the Campanian government, a temple dedicated to the goddess Venus, and the remains of an ancient villa.
Intriguingly, according to scholars the Roman poet Virgil once read enchanting verses to students on the island estate. Regarded as the poet of love, it was Virgil whom Italian poet Dante chose as his guide through hell and purgatory in “Dante’s Inferno.”
Beautiful Gaiola may be, and its past enchanting, but Posillipo inhabitants remain ever wary to tread there. Its wave-racked shores and haunting history are perhaps better left alone.
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