Queer Places:
Ca' Dario, Campiello Barbaro, 353, 30123 Venezia VE
Count Filippo Giordano delle Lanze (1924 - July 19, 1970) was killed at 46 on 19 July 1970 in Ca 'Dario, a famous Venetian palace on the Grand Canal, a legendary place for its "fatal history" over the years. Filippo Giordano Delle Lanze, art and antiques expert - of Turin origins but moved to Venice where he bought Ca 'Dario at auction in 1968 - was found dead by the maid the day after the crime. He had been hit several times in the head with a weapon which was later identified with a heavy silver vase. The nobleman's corpse lay on the ground, half naked, in a pool of blood, in the bedroom, next to a painting. The suspects, also based on the testimony of the housekeeper, turned to a Croatian sailor, Raoul Blasich, a friend of the victim. The housekeeper told that she had heard them discuss animatedly on the very evening of the crime.
Raoul Blasich was acquitted in the first degree but was later sentenced to 18 years, but he never did prison time, because he managed to get away the day of the discovery of the count's corpse.
The murder of Filippo Giordano delle Lanze was also dealt with in 1989 by the Rai Tre program "Telefono Giallo", during which a live phone call spoke of the testimony of a woman who, on the evening of the crime, was allegedly hit by two young men rushed out of Ca 'Dario.
Precisely the Ca 'Dario crime theater would present strong similarities with the crime scene in Florence in which the murder took place of Alvise Nicolis di Robilant, himself an art expert, also found half naked in the living room of his home, who died after being repeatedly and violently hit on the head.
There are those who say that Ca 'Dario was built on a former Templar cemetery, indicating in this the cause of the structural failure that makes it leaning to the right and, above all, of the ghosts from which Christopher Sebastian Lambert, the music producer of the Who, said to be so tormented as to prefer, more often than not, to sleep in the kiosk of the gondoliers of Santa Maria del Giglio. Whether this is true or not, Ca 'Dario has become par excellence the "cursed palace" and many scholars of the paranormal affirm with conviction that the reason for so many disasters lies in the negative energy connected to the water on which it rests.
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