A Man Squeezed Through This Chapel’s Lost Trapdoor – And Found A Hidden Room Of Forgotten Secrets
It’s 1975 in Florence, Italy, and Medici Chapel Museum director Paolo Dal Poggetto has a problem. According to The Washington Post, the institution sees over 500,000 visitors each year. But the only exit and entrance are close together in a cramped corridor. So, the director is hunting for an alternative way out. He moves an old piece of furniture in his hunt for extra space. Unexpectedly, this reveals a trapdoor set in the floor. And opening it reveals a hidden cache that will astound the world.
Dal Poggetto had been in a small room – a vestry – just off the main chapel when he made his discovery. He’d been moving various pieces of furniture just to see whether there was any possibility of creating an exit from this diminutive chamber. But it was when the expert pushed aside an old wardrobe that he spotted the wooden trapdoor.
The museum director pushed one old wardrobe in the vestry aside, and that’s when he spotted the mysterious trap door. It seems this small entrance set in the floor had been entirely forgotten about over the years. Pulling it open, Dal Poggetto saw a steep staircase leading down into the gloom. And as far as he could see, the space was filled with junk.
It seems that this forgotten chamber hadn’t been used for some two decades. Previously, it had served as a store for charcoal which fueled the primitive heating system of braziers. Then in November 1966 the River Arno which flows through Florence flooded with devastating consequences. The deadly waters reached heights of up to 20 feet and claimed the lives of 101 of the city’s people, according to the website Into Florence.
The Basilica di San Lorenzo is a church of the Medici family. It also includes Michelangelo’s New Sacristy and that mysterious chamber under the trap door. Sadly, the church is one of the places that was deluged by the flood. The building and the Sacristy were later cleaned up, but the small room had simply been shut up beneath its trapdoor. This entrance was then apparently concealed by the wardrobe in the vestry.
