The Hospital of the Holy Spirit
For seven-and-a-half centuries, Rome's Santo Spirito has remained an “oasis of security and peace." Its foundation on the site of an Anglo-Saxon hospice, Iris Origo writes, was inspired by the dream that visited an early thirteenth-century pontiff.
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One night at the beginning of his pontificate, in the first years of the thirteenth century, Pope Innocent III had a terrible dream. He dreamed that the fishermen who, early every morning, cast their nets into the Tiber for the Papal table, drew up, instead of fish, a grisly haul: the corpses of three drowned babies, whose mothers had thrown them into the river. The next day—moved by compassion for these innocent victims of sin and poverty—the Pope ordered the foundation of the great institution which is still one of the chief hospitals of Rome: Santo Spirito in Saxia.
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