Aragonese Castle, Ischia

Neapel · Italy · Castle

In the Poor Clares' cemetery stand stone seats with holes beneath. The sisters kept vigil by their dead until only bone was left.

The castle stands on a volcanic islet off Ischia Ponte, joined to the main island by a narrow causeway. In 1575 Beatrice Quadra founded a convent of Poor Clares inside its walls, home to some forty nuns, almost all of them first-born daughters of noble families placed in the cloister so that the inheritance would stay with the sons. Beneath the church of the Immacolata lies their cemetery: barrel-vaulted rooms lined with masonry seats, the scolatoi, each with a hole under the seat. There the dead sisters were placed while the body drained. The living came daily to pray beside them and contemplate mortality, in a damp and a stench that shortened their own lives. The convent was suppressed in 1810. Tradition says the passages carry whispers at full moon and that doors close by themselves.

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Where is Aragonese Castle, Ischia located?

Aragonese Castle, Ischia is in Neapel, Italy.

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