Parco Giovanni Paolo II

This guide to Parco Giovanni Paolo II in Milan begins on this ground in the summer of 1630, when a plague-stricken city turned on a barber named Gian Giacomo Mora and a health inspector named Guglielmo Pizza. It follows what was done to them and the stone column the authorities raised afterward as a warning, later known as the Colonna Infame, and how the novelist Alessandro Manzoni spent two centuries revisiting the case. Generations earlier, the same square saw women burned here as witches.