Maybe it’s the black background, but the feathery ring above has an eerie vibe to it. A ghirlanda—Italian for garland—like this one would have smelled “extremely nasty,” at least at first, according to one report. Woven among the feathers, there would be bone, hair, even old teeth, and it had a sinister purpose. Hidden in a person’s bed, it was supposed to cause them to fall ill and die. “Everyone believed I had bought the ghirlanda in order to get rid of my husband!” wrote an English historian living in Italy, in a letter to a friend who’d asked her to procure one—purely for research. (Or so the friend said.)
