Mysteries of the Abandoned (Like a Shot Entertainment/Discovery)

Mysteries of the Abandoned is a top-rating series in the US that is broadcast around the world. The show features abandoned, closed, or disused sites and feats of engineering of all kinds, throughout the world. It’s filmed in an observational documentary style – there is no presenter – with the intriguing stories told by the people who were there, previous owners, workers, people who lived through the events that ended with the site being abandoned.

For the current season, Fabio Di Segni was called on by Like A Shot Entertainment to research, scout, prep and organize production services for the television shoot in two locations: Fossa in the Abruzzo region and the Palazzo D’Avalos on the island of Procida.

Fossa is a historic town in the Abruzzo region of Italy with its roots going back more than a thousand years. But all that came to an end in the early hours of the morning of April 7^th, 2009 when it was the epicentre of a powerful earthquake of 5.4. The loss of life and damage was catastrophic, crippling the city’s entire infrastructure. Roads, bridges, railways and essential services like water and electricity were in shambles. Thousands of people lost their homes and livelihoods.

In the intervening years, a new town of Fossa has been built next to the ruins of the old. Gianna Colagrande, the Vice Mayor, was interviewed for the programme and recounts her experience of that terrible night. She takes the camera crew around the town showing them the remains of once-beautiful buildings, among them the ancient church.

The second story that Fabio Di Segni worked on was the Palazzo D’Avalos, a splendid palace built in the 1500s by the Spanish D’Avalos family on the highest point of the island of Procida overlooking the sea on all sides, and called Terra Murata, or ‘walled land’.

The island had been under attack for centuries by raids of Saracen Pirates. So, to fortify the island, an imposing fortified palace was built on the highest point to serve as both fortress and stately residence. The only entrance to the palace is through the Portale di Ferro (Iron Gate)

The palace was eventually abandoned by the d’Avalos family and in 1830 the building was turned into a prison, by adding grates to the windows and doors, and creating new spaces such as the hospital, laundry and the textile mill where inmates worked to make linen.

Dr. Giacomo Retaggio was the prison doctor for 25 years and he is the guide in this episode of Mysteries of the Abandoned. Now in his 80’’s, Dr. Retaggio remembers starting there as a young doctor and recalls that many of the prisoners had come from mental hospitals, all of them were murderers. The conditions of the original prison were horrendous – just one toilet for the whole prison and dormitories of up to 40 men. Punishment cells were down in the dungeons where prisoners were stripped of shoelaces and belts (to avoid suicides) and strapped to a wooden table for hours on end.

The prison was renovated in the ‘70s and then closed in 1988, but today visitors can see the building much as it was. Relics of prison life remain; rusty beds, shoes and clothes of the inmates, old sewing machines, the guards’ uniforms, Dr. Retaggio’s surgery with old registers and dusty medicine bottles.

Production Company: Like a Shot Entertainment

Broacasters: Discovery Discovery+, UKTV